Jennie Burnet is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines war, genocide, racial violence, peacebuilding, reconciliation, and human rights. For more than twenty years, she has researched Rwanda and the 1994 genocide of Tutsis.

She is the award-winning author of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda published in 2012. Her recent book, To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue during the Rwandan Genocide, examines how and why some Rwandans risked their lives to save Tutsi from the carnage. Her research has appeared in Politics & Gender, African Affairs, African Studies Review, and Women’s Studies International Forum.

Professor Burnet’s current research focuses on (1) understanding the long-term impacts of racialized violence in the U.S. South on affect, embodied memory, and political geographies; (2) documenting the history of Islam in Rwanda and the roles of Rwandan Muslims’ in the 1994 genocide; and (3) women’s social movements and women’s roles in democratization, conflict resolution, and peace building.

Dr. Burnet holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining Georgia State University in August 2015, she was an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Louisville. In 2019, she was a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow in the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.