Biography

Emily Burrill is a scholar of twentieth century West African history and the history of gender and sexuality in French empire. Her scholarship and teaching explore historical questions of gender and belonging in colonial and postcolonial communities, law and society, rights formation, and feminist theory. At UVA, she is Associate Professor in the Department of History and a member of the John Nau, III History and Principles of Democracy Lab. In these roles, she teaches classes on histories of gender and sexuality, modern Africa, and she develops and support programming in the core lab of the Democracy Initiative. 

Burrill’s first monograph was States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (2015), which won the 2016 French Colonial Historical Society Heggoy Prize. She is also the co-author of two edited volumes: Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2010) and Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State (2021). She has written numerous articles and chapters on a range of topics including forced marriage, gender and enslavement in the Senegambia, masculinity, and gun rights. Her current book project is an episodic history that explores the gendered implications of citizenship for West Africans living in African territories of the French Union and postcolonial West Africa between 1946 and the mid-1960s. 

Before arriving at UVA, Burrill taught for twelve years in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the past six years, she also served as the Director of the UNC-CH African Studies Center. Through this work she developed commitments to collaborations with international scholars and universities, foreign language study, exploring ethical directions in U.S. study abroad, and supporting international students on U.S. campuses.