The School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsyvania in Philadelphia has announced the appointment of six scholars to endowed chairs. Four of the appointments went to women.
Kristen Ghodsee is the Catherine Bryson Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Dr. Ghodsee also serves as a member of the graduate groups in anthropology, history, and comparative literature. She has been conducting primary ethnographic field work in Eastern Europe for more than 30 years and has written widely on the history of socialism, capitalism, and the impact of political economic structures on ordinary life. Her latest book is Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Dr. Ghodsee is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she majored in literature and theatre arts. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in social and cultural studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ayako Kano has been named the R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Dr. Kano’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, politics, and Japanese cultural history from the early modern era to the present. She is the author of Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). Professor Kano is a graduate of Keio University in Minato, Japan. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Leigh Stearns has been named the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Natural Sciences. Dr. Stearns’ research focuses on understanding how glaciers and climate interact over a variety of time scales. She uses satellite remote sensing, field observations, and numerical modeling to understand glacier dynamics, iceberg calving, and ice-ocean interactions in Greenland and Antarctica. Before joining Penn in 2024, she spent 15 years on the faculty at the University of Kansas and served as a faculty fellow with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2022–2025. Dr. Stearns is a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She holds a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maine.
Deborah A. Thomas, chair of the department of anthropology, has been named the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought. She also directs the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Dr. Thomas is the author of Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance (Duke University Press, 2025), Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Duke University Press, 2019), and Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2011). Professor Thomas is a graduate of Brown University, where she majored in semiotics. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University.