Contact Information
309 Gregory Hall
810 S Wright
M/C 466
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Interests
Modern Britain and empire; colonial India; women, race, gender and feminism; archives and embodied experience; postcolonial studies; world history; the biocultural and animal histories; and anti-imperial critique and method.
Research Description
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.
Education
B.A. Yale University, 1983
M.A. University of Chicago, 1984
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1990
Grants
Principal Investigator
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities without Walls ($12.2million)
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emerging Areas in the Humanities ($2m)
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Publishing without Walls (co-PI; $1m)
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Odyssey Project ($650,000)
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Interseminars” (planning grant, $150,000)
* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Interseminars” ($2m)
* ACLS/DRIVE Postdoc-to-Faculty/Early Career URM scholars ($170k)
* Presidential Initiative for Celebrating the Arts and Humanities ($150,000)
* UIUC Inv. for Growth, Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (c. $660k)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Professor, Gender and Women's Studies
Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
CAS Professor, Center for Advanced Study
Director, Humanities Research Institute, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Professor, Women & Gender in Global Perspectives
Professor, European Union Center
Professor, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Professor, Center for African Studies
Professor, Center for Global Studies
External Links
Honors & Awards
Swanlund Endowed Professor, University of Illinois, 2018-
Center for Advanced Study Professor, 2018-
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 2010-11
Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities Fellowship, UIUC, 2011-12
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2015 (declined)
Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, 2004-18
University Scholar, University of Illinois, 2001-2004
William Evans Residential Fellowship, University of Otago (Dunedin, NZ), 2004
American Philosophical Society Research Fellowship, 1995
NEH summer seminar, “The Culture of London, 1850-1925,” Institute of Historical Research, London, 1995
American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, 1993
Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, 1987-88
Recent Publications
Burton, A. (Accepted/In press). Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies. Settler Colonial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2024.2371481
Burton, A., Davis, J. L., & Brennan, M. L. (2024). Reciprocity and redistribution: Methodologies for rethinking public and community-based humanities research. In The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (pp. 66-78). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003248125-5
Burton, A. M., Davis, J. L., & Brennan, M. L. (2024). Reciprocity and Redistribution: Methodologies for Rethinking Public and Community-based Humanities Research . In D. Fisher-Livne, & M. May-Curry (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (Routledge Literature Companions). Routledge.
Burton, A., Davis, J. L., & Brennan, M. L. (2024). Redistribution and Reciprocity. In The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (pp. 417-418). Taylor and Francis.
Burton, A. (2023). New Histories of Gender, Mobility and Labour: India and the Indian Diaspora. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 30(1), 7-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/09715215221133526
