Two LAS professors elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Two faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been newly elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. History professor Antoinette Burton and chemistry professor Jonathan Sweedler are among the nearly 250 inductees for 2025.

Founded in 1780, the academy recognizes scientists, artists, scholars and leaders who have distinguished themselves in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Burton, director of the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois, is a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire with a special focus on colonial India. Women, feminism and gender history are also central topics of her research and writing, including her most recent book, “Gender History: A Very Short Introduction,” which gives an overview of gender history as a category of historical analysis since the 1970s and details how the field has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration and empire. Burton holds the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair. She also serves as the principal investigator of Humanities Without Walls, a multi-institutional consortium for interdisciplinary humanities research sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, and is chair of the faculty board of the University of Illinois Press.

Sweedler specializes in analytical chemistry and neurochemistry to understand cell-to-cell signaling pathways involved with learning, behavior and memory. He is the James R. Eiszner Family Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Illinois and also the editor-in-chief of the nearly century-old journal Analytical Chemistry. Sweedler’s research team is developing mass imaging approaches that allow thousands of individual cells to be analyzed — measurement capabilities that are wholly unique and not currently available elsewhere. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society and was honored with the Visionary Award from the American Diabetes Association.

Elsewhere at U of I, materials science professor Paul Braun and physics professor Aida El-Khadra were also elected. The new members will be inducted at an October ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The complete list of members elected to the academy is available on its website.