Virtual Lunch With Friends and Strangers: Emily Burrill

Wednesday, June 3 | 12:00 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Wherever You Are
Price:  Complimentary

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Click in with Carolina Public Humanities for this series, Lunch With Friends and Strangers: Conversations With UNC’s Faculty. This virtual lunch talk features a discussion of Aoua Keita (1912 – 1980), The Revolutionary Midwife of the Sahel, during a conversation with Emily Burrill.

Emily Burrill, Associate Professor; Director, African Studies Center at UNC Global Joint Appointment in Women’s & Gender Studies

Emily Burrill’s research centers on twentieth century francophone West Africa and histories of gender and power within colonial and postcolonial contexts. She is the author of States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Ohio U. Press, 2015). States of Marriage is the 2016 winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, which recognizes the best book dealing with the French colonial experience from 1815 to the present. In the book, Burrill takes up marriage as a cultural practice related to value, exchange, and belief, as well as an instrument for managing rights, obligations, and privileges between individuals and political communities. She examines how the contours of marriage reform in French Soudan (colonial Mali) can be traced through transformations in the colonial court system and local African engagements with state-making processes. Burrill is currently working on a book-length project on themes of gender, mobility, and belonging in post-WWII Francophone West Africa. Her research has been funded by fellowships through Fulbright, Mellon, and the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill.