Antoinette Burton | Fung Public Lecture: 'Post/Imperial Longing: Cornelia Sorabji in Victorian Oxford'

Antoinette Burton

Swanlund Endowed Chair and Professor of History

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Antoinette Burton is a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Humanities Research Institute. She holds a Swanlund Endowed Chair and is a Center for Advanced Study Professor.

She has written on topics ranging from feminism and colonialism to the relationship of empire to the nation and the world. Women, gender, sexuality, and the archive have always been central to her research, which has drawn on intersectional methods to historicize race as a modality through which imperial identities and systems operate. Her work has explored imperial politics, mobility, house and home, and world histories from below, frequently in collaboration with New Zealand historian Tony Ballantyne. She is the founding series editor of Primers for Teaching History at Duke University Press.

Gender History: A Very Short Introduction  (Oxford University Press) and Biocultural Empire, co-edited with Renisa Mawani and Samantha Frost (Bloomsbury UK), were both published in 2024. Another edited collection, Up Against the Archive: Experiments in Writing British Empire History Otherwise, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

In 2023 she was appointed to the Board of Illinois Humanities. She serves as the chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.

In 2025 she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.