Katherine Burns

University of Pennsylvania Scholar Award

Katherine Burns is a scholar of nineteenth century US History. Prior to her award, Katherine was a Lecturer in Modern US and Global History at the University of Glasgow (2025–2026), a Bonn–Yale Anton Wilhelm Amo Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (2024–2025) and a Lecturer in American History at Aberystwyth University (2023–2024). Katherine received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024, and her first monograph is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press. This award at the University of Pennsylvania will give Katherine the opportunity to conduct research for her second monograph, provisionally entitled ‘Beautiful Lessons: Recovering the Bustill Women and their Activist Networks.’ This project explores the intergenerational history of the Bustill family — a prominent Black family in Philadelphia — through the eyes of seven Bustill women: Grace Bustill Douglass, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Sarah Humphrey Bustill, Maria Bustill, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Mary Mossell Griffin and Anna Bustill Smith. By mapping their activist networks across several generations, this multigenerational story foregrounds the significant contributions of the Bustill women to broader fights for racial and gender equality in Philadelphia and across the US, enabling wider conclusions to be reached about the nature of Black women's intersectional feminist campaigning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.