CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A University of Illinois professor specializing in the history of the British Empire has won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Antoinette Burton, a professor of history and the Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at Illinois, was one of 180 artists, scientists and scholars receiving this year’s fellowships, which were announced on Wednesday (April 14).
The prestigious fellowships are awarded “on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise,” according to a release from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This year’s fellows were chosen from a group of about 3,000 applicants and the rolls of past winners include “thousands of celebrated alumni and scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prizewinners,” according to the foundation.
Burton, who also chairs the history department, specializes in the history of Britain and the British Empire, as well as in the history of women and gender. She was awarded a fellowship to work on a book currently titled “Empire from Below: Resistance in the British Empire From the Opium Wars to Mau Mau.” The book will “offer the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was through its long, unstable life,” according to Burton.
Burton is an author or editor of eight books. She joined the Illinois history faculty in 1999 and has been department chair since 2005.
