Antoinette Burton

I’m a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a specialty in colonial India and an ongoing interest in Australasia and Africa. I’ve written on topics ranging from feminism and colonialism to the relationship of empire to the nation and the world. Women, gender and sexuality have always been central to my research, which has drawn on intersectional methods to privilege race as a modality through which systems and identities operate. I've been especially concerned with the role of Indian women in India, in Britain and in the wider diaspora. I’ve edited collections about politics, mobility, postcolonialism, animals and world histories from below, and have frequently collaborated with Tony Ballantyne. In collaboration with Renisa Mawani I have developed some expertise in imagining what more-than-human histories might look like.

At Illinois I have taught courses on modern British history and imperialism, gender and colonialism, autobiography and the archive, approaches and methods, and world history. I am currently working on several collaborations, which take the form of edited collections on subjects ranging from critical fabulations to history and poetry.  I am the editor of a Duke University Press series on history teaching. And my most recent monograph, Gender History: A Very Short Introduction, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. A collection co-edited with Mawani and Samantha Frost called Biocultural Empire is due out from Bloomsbury UK in 2025.

In addition to my work as a historian, I am the director of the campus humanities center, The Humanities Research Institute. For more information click here. I am also 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 me to think and write about both the value of humanistic perspectives in the public sphere and about the humanities as a social practice.

In 2023 I was appointed to the Board of Illinois Humanities. I also serve as the chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.

For cv, click here.