Antoinette Burton
Antoinette Burton is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her focus as a historian is on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and its empire. She wrote path-breaking works on the relationship between feminism and colonialism in Great Britain. Women, gender and sexuality have been central to her research, much of which has been concerned with the role of Indian women in the imperial and postcolonial imagination. She also edited collections about politics, mobility, postcolonialism and empire that helped shaped those fields and authored a primer on world history designed for teachers of that notoriously difficult and amorphous course.
At UIUC Burton is the director of the campus humanities center, The Humanities Research Institute and the Principal Investigator for Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants which support The Odyssey Project and the 16-partner consortium, Humanities Without Walls. This work, together with a fellowship at the OpEd Project, has led to her work on the value of humanistic perspectives in the public sphere and about the humanities as a social practice. In addition, she is an appointed member of the Board of Illinois Humanities and serves as the chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.