Georgia Brunner

Education
BA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Research Interests
Modern East Africa
Gender
Empire and Colonialism
Labor
Dissertation
"Building a Nation: Gender, Colonialism, and the Struggle for a National Identity"
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.