Antoinette Burton is the Principal Investigator on The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Without Walls grant. Burton is a Swanlund Endowed Chair and Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
A feminist historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, Burton has 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 her research, much of which has been concerned with the role of Indian women in the imperial and postcolonial imagination.
In her capacity as Director of HRI, Burton is the Principal Investigator of a number of grants awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including Emerging Areas in the Humanities and The Odyssey Project. She also oversees HRI’s Training in Digital Methods for Humanists project (funded by the campus Investment for Growth initiative) and a grant through the ACLS’ Postdoctoral Partnership Initiative (the latter based in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences).