Two Penn professors named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows for mid-career scholarship

Two Penn faculty members were named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows for their notable work as mid-career scholars.   

Penn professors Wale Adebanwi and Deborah Thomas were two of 188 fellows chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants for their career achievement and potential. This year's fellows span 52 scholarly and artistic disciplines and include novelists, poets, and photographers as well as scholars.   

Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded the fellowship annually to “culture creators" across the United States and Canada. It provides monetary support for fellows to pursue independent research under “the freest possible conditions.”    

Penn faculty have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships every year since 2015, with four Penn professors having received the honor last year.   

Adebanwi, who serves as the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for Africana Studies, was the only 2024 fellow selected in the African Studies category. Adebanwi’s research focuses on social mobilization in Africa through areas like ethnicity, nationalism, media, and urban formations. He has previously received grants and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.   

During his fellowship, Adebanwi will continue to work on his current project, “The Enlightenment in Africa: Newspaper Press and Intellectual Responses to Modernity and Colonialism in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century Nigeria.” This project focuses on connecting the history of the Enlightenment to the history of people of African descent and will require Adebanwi to travel throughout the United States, Nigeria, and England.   

Thomas was one of four scholars selected in the Anthropology and Cultural Studies category this year. Thomas serves as the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and as a faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. She also holds secondary appointments in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies.    

Thomas’ research interests include political anthropology, transnationalism, and popular culture. Her book, “Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair,” was bestowed the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association and the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize. In addition to her research, she co-directed and co-produced two films focused on postcolonialism in Jamaica.   

Along with continuing her current work, Thomas will use the fellowship to begin work on her newest book, “Inheritance: A Speculative Ethnography of Evidence,” which will discuss the history of eugenics and culture in Jamaica and the way those topics connect with questions about embodied knowledge and inheritance.