Gender, Colonialism, and Feminist Collaboration

This essay discusses the syllabus for “Gender and Colonialism,” a graduate seminar we have offered at the University of Illinois, both jointly and individually, over the course of the past six years. We recount its conception and execution as a feminist collaborative process by historians trained in different fields—Burton identifies as a British empire historian, Allman as an Africanist—as we have grappled with the limits and possibilities of the transnational as a historical concept and a feminist analytical tool in the context of thinking through what the combination of gender with colonialism might mean.