Lynn M. Thomas

I am a historian of politics and gender in twentieth-century Africa. As a student, I was drawn to the discipline of history by a desire to gain knowledge of the past in order to better understand the problems and possibilities of the present. In recent years, I have taught courses on African history since 1880, the global history of AIDS, comparative colonialisms, and comparative gender. In addition to being in the Department of History, I am an Adjunct Professor in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department, and in the Anthropology Department, and an active member of the African Studies Program.

My first book, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (University of California Press, 2003), examines how and why female circumcision, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy became the subject of intense debate and intervention in colonial and, after 1963, postcolonial Kenya. Through these reproductive controversies, I argue, girls and young women reworked their relations with men and senior women, and contested the scope of state power. Since completing Politics of the Womb, my research focus has shifted from East to Southern Africa and from the study of dyadic relations between a colony and its European colonial power to considering multi-directional relations between colonies, nations, and empires. In two co-edited volumes, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Duke University, 2008) and Love in Africa (University of Chicago, 2009), I have explored the emergence of capitalist consumer culture, mass media, and new conceptions of gender, race, and intimacy in Africa and beyond.

My new book Beneath the Surface (Duke and Wits University, 2020) is a transnational history of skin lighteners centered in South Africa that extends into the broader Southern African region, East Africa, and the United States. In teasing out skin lighteners' layered history, I consider the body's surface as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Over the years, my research has been supported by fellowships from the Watson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright), Woodrow Wilson Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies. I have served as Chair of the Department of History (2012-15), a co-editor of the Journal of African History (2010-14), and Interim Executive Director of the UW School of Drama (2018-20).