Professor Antoinette Burton has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. Materials science professor Paul Braun, physics professor Aida El-Khadra and chemistry professor Jonathan Sweedler were also among the nearly 250 inductees for 2025. Founded in 1780, the academy recognizes scientists, artists, scholars and leaders who have distinguished themselves in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.
Burton, director of the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois, is a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire with a special focus on colonial India. Women, feminism and gender history are also central topics of her research and writing, including her most recent book, “Gender History: A Very Short Introduction,” which gives an overview of gender history as a category of historical analysis since the 1970s and details how the field has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration and empire. Burton holds the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair. She also serves as the principal investigator of Humanities Without Walls, a multi-institutional consortium for interdisciplinary humanities research sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, and is chair of the faculty board of the University of Illinois Press.
The new members will be inducted at an October ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The complete list of members elected to the academy is available on its website.
Editor's note: This story was adapted from an announcement on the University of Illinois News Bureau website.