Georgia Brunner


Education

BA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Research Interests

Modern East Africa
Gender History
Empire and Colonialism
Labor History

Dissertation

“Building a Nation: Gender, Labor and the Politics of Nationalism in Colonial Rwanda, 1916-1962”

Faculty Advisors

Clifton Crais
Mariana P. Candido

Biography 

I am a scholar of gender and colonialism in Africa. My research centers on late colonialism and early postcolonialism in Rwanda. I seek to understand the relationship between forced colonial labor obligations and the construction of gender in the politics of decolonization. By centering the voices of women and men in Rwanda, I examine decolonization and labor from the ground up, articulating the need for names and faces in histories of large political movements. My areas of focus are: women in the formal economy, neo-traditionalism in postcolonialism, constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the politics of urban/rural divides in modern Africa.

My research has been generously supported by awards from Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the Fulbright-Hays, as well as two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships and the Halle Graduate Global Research Fellowship. My research has also been awarded with the Francis S. Benjamin Prize and the ​​Emory Institute of African Studies Graduate Student Prize.