Emily Burrill completed her Ph.D. in the Department of History at Stanford University in 2007. She is currently working on a manuscript concerning the 19th and 20th century history of marriage and marriage-related practices in the border town of Sikasso, Mali (West Africa). Her work explores the ways in which women and men – as litigants, court assessors, interpreters, colonial administrators, political leaders, husbands and wives – contributed in gendered ways to the codification, implementation and contestation of marriage practices throughout the colonial and early post-colonial period of Mali. She is also interested in the ways that bridewealth payment, divorce, domestic violence, inheritance disputes, child custody claims and co-wife relations were embedded in other historical transformations of the region, such as migrant labor and forced labor, the growth and movement of Muslim communities, World War II, colonial independence and the early post-colonial period in the Republic of Mali. Her other research interests include midwifery and the recent history of bio-medical knowledge of women’s bodies in francophone Africa, women and citizenship rights in post-colonial Africa, the history of human rights, and French colonial history.

Her work has been published in the journals Cahiers d’Études Africaines and Slavery and Abolition. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book, Domestic Violence and the Law in Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, with Richard Roberts and Elizabeth Thornberry (Ohio University Press).

Professor Burrill currently teaches courses on gender and imperialism, African gender history, and women and the law in modern Africa and the Middle East. She can be reached at eburrill@email.unc.edu.

© UNC Chapel Hill 2007