Georgia BrunnerGraduate Student
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.
Education
- BA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Research Interests
Modern East Africa
Gender History
Empire and Colonialism
Labor History
Environmental History
Dissertation
“Building a Nation: Gender, Labor and the Politics of Nationalism in Colonial Rwanda, 1916-1962”
