Nostalgia and Genocide: Remembering Violence & Inventing the Future in Rwanda

Jennie E. Burnet is an associate professor in the Global Studies Institute at Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 and her Bachelor of Arts in French and Comparative Literature from Boston University in 1994. Before joining Georgia State University, she was an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Louisville in Kentucky (USA).

Her work explores the social, cultural and psychological aspects of war, genocide, and mass violence and the micro-level impact of large-scale social change in the context of conflict. The majority of her research has focused on changing gender roles, the politics of memory, and local coping mechanisms in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. She is currently conducting research on (1) organized resistance, rescuer behavior, and rescuers during in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; (2) the long-term cultural, social, and psychological consequences of gender-based violence during conflict on women’s agency; and (3) women’s social movements and women’s roles in democratization, conflict resolution, and peace building.