“I will bring my passion for cross-disciplinary, collaborative, experimental, and public-facing work to the directorship of the Simpson Center,” said Thomas.
The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities is delighted to announce the appointment of Lynn M. Thomas as its next director, commencing in the Fall Quarter of 2025. Professor Thomas succeeds Kathleen Woodward, whose transformative leadership shaped 25 years of humanities research and collaboration at the Simpson Center.
Professor Thomas brings extensive administrative leadership experience and a strong commitment to collaborative research in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences to the role. She has served as department chair for History and Drama, among other high-level leadership positions in the College of Arts & Sciences, during her career at the University of Washington.
A historian of politics and gender in East and Southern Africa, Professor Thomas is the author of two monographs, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020) and Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (University of California Press, 2003). With five of her colleagues at the UW, she is the co-editor of the volume The Modern Girl Around the World (Duke University Press, 2008), which emerged from a multi-year collaborative project supported by the Simpson Center; it was recently translated into Chinese. She also co-edited Love in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Her current research is on the global history of abortion, exploring entangled themes of colonialism and decolonization, gender politics and popular culture, and medical and legal change. She received her PhD in African history from the University of Michigan and joined the University of Washington faculty in 1997.
“I will bring my passion for cross-disciplinary, collaborative, experimental, and public-facing work to the directorship of the Simpson Center,” said Thomas. “Over the past 25 years, Kathleen Woodward has made the center a national and international leader in digital humanities, public scholarship, and reimagining the humanities. At a time when public faith in higher education is declining and more are questioning the value of a liberal arts education, we need to support the diversity and richness of humanistic inquiry while continuing to forge ways to make our work legible, relevant, and exciting to wider publics. More than ever, humanities faculty, especially at public universities, need to combine rigorous, in-depth scholarship with an openness to broader questions and creative outreach.”
As the successor of Kathleen Woodward, Lynn M. Thomas is poised to continue and build on the spirit of collaboration and intellectual curiosity embodied by the Simpson Center. As Dean Dianne Harris said in announcing her appointment, "Professor Thomas promises to be a visionary leader for the Simpson Center and across the college at a significant juncture both locally and nationally."