About

Antoinette Burton is a historian specializing in 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a particular focus on colonial India, Australasia, and Africa. Her research encompasses topics such as feminism, colonialism, empire, race, gender, sexuality, and postcolonial studies, often employing intersectional methods to analyze how race and systems of identity operate within these contexts. Burton has extensively studied the role of Indian women in India, Britain, and the diaspora, and her work explores the relationship between empire, the nation, and the world. She has authored and edited numerous works, including her most recent monograph, 'Gender History: A Very Short Introduction,' published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, and a forthcoming collection titled 'Biocultural Empire.' Burton has contributed to the development of more-than-human histories through collaborations and has taught courses on modern British history, imperialism, gender, colonialism, autobiography, archives, and world history at Illinois. In addition to her scholarly work, she serves as the director of the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois and is involved in various initiatives promoting the public understanding of the humanities. Her academic career is distinguished by multiple fellowships, awards, and leadership roles, including her appointment to the Board of Illinois Humanities and her chairmanship of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Computer Science
• Ancient history
• Philosophy
• Art
• Literature
• Gender studies
• Management
• Classics
• Medicine
• Archaeology
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Reciprocity and Redistribution

  2024-05-31 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter offers a history of how Humanities Without Walls (HWW), a consortium project funded by the Mellon Foundation, has taken up the promises and challenges of the public humanities. HWW is a seedbed for modeling ethical practices of genuinely reciprocal and redistributive relationships as the foundation of a world of inquiry “without walls.” Here the development of reciprocal and redistributive (R&R) methodologies in one aspect of the HWW grant work: the Grand Research Challenge awards, is charted. The story is told of what interdisciplinary collaborative grantmaking has become over the life of the grant since 2015, as a result of both recent convulsive social and political changes and of the long-standing underlying conditions of economic inequality and racial injustice that are an ongoing feature of contemporary life. The process has shifted to centering colleagues in and outside the research/R1 university who already do this work, making their methods available to prospective grantees as part of how the R&R concept is socialized. The chapter details the ways HWW has encouraged collaborators to make co-designing a priority from the start of their work. In the process, the stakes of the “publics” in the public humanities at this historical juncture are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Biocultural Empire as Anticolonial Method

  2024-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Intersectionality and the making of gender history

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-07-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter questions the grand narrative of progress that undergirds some accounts of gender history as a field, showing that far from displacing women’s history or being supplanted by intersectional, queer, and trans methods, gender history has exerted an ongoing influence at the confluence of these scholarly practices. It tracks the origins of US thinking about the simultaneity of gender and race through the work of the African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who brought intersectionality into the US scholarly lexicon; the impact of multiracial scholarship on teaching in the United States; and the manifestation of these trends across histories in a variety of times and places.

  PublisherDOI

• Gender History: A Very Short Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This volume is designed to introduce readers to the scholarly field of gender history: its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places in the scholarship of the last five decades. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject and what difference gender difference makes. The book explores how gender history as a practice subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past—with ramifications, of course, for what they are today.

  PublisherDOI

• Some origins of gender history as a field

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-07-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter tracks the role of the foundational journal in the field, Gender and History, as an archive of how historians have understood the categories of both “gender” and “history” in the two decades following the journal’s establishment in 1989. The journal was founded to address the work of gender as a site of historical experience, meaning, and significance. The chapter also addresses the significance of Joan Scott’s work, as well as how structures of class and race, and voices from beyond the United States and the West, have impacted gender history. The chapter emphasizes a variety of challenges to the study of gender history, as well as the primacy of gender as a category of historical analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Histoires d'archives

  Cahiers du Genre · 2024-12-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Queering the subject

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-07-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter continues to challenge the notion that gender history is part of a progressive Western narrative by placing the emergence of queer and trans histories alongside rather than following on from its work. It examines the trajectory of the field, a terrain upon which debates over the limits and possibilities of gender itself have been continually worked out—with profound implications for the discipline of history itself. It also shows how the “gender trouble” at the heart of these methods has been shaped by both intersectionality and the work of scholars who research histories beyond the West. It surveys important titles and trends in the fields of queer and trans histories as well as the ongoing echoes of debates original to the field broadly conceived.

  PublisherDOI

• Holding space in colonial settler histories: book forum on Alaina E. Roberts’ <i>I’ve been here all the while: Black freedom on native land</i> (2021)

  Settler Colonial Studies · 2024-01-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies

  Settler Colonial Studies · 2024-07-07

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the "big tent" metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton's 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies' remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.

  PublisherDOI

• At the Heart of the Empire

  2023-11-11

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tony Ballantyne

  29 shared

• Catherine Hall

  20 shared

• Jean Allman

  Washington University in St. Louis

  13 shared

• Isabel Hofmeyr

  Stockholm University

  4 shared

• Glyndwr Williams

  4 shared

• Marina Larsson

  3 shared

• Avril A. Powell

  3 shared

• Ian K. Steele

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2010-11)
• Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities Fellowsh…
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2015, decl…
• William Evans Residential Fellowship, University of Otago (2…
• American Philosophical Society Research Fellowship (1995)