Vernon Burton

Orville Vernon Burton is a professor of history at Clemson University, the director of its Clemson CyberInstitute, and an author. He formerly served as director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (CHASS) and professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he is associate director for humanities and social sciences.

Career Burton was born in Royston, Georgia and grew up in Ninety Six, South Carolina. He received a B.A. in 1969 for his undergraduate studies at Furman University. After service in the Army Reserve he entered graduate school at Princeton University. His dissertation involved tens of thousands of IBM cards on individuals and farms for a county in South Carolina in the mid 19th century. His undergraduate research assistant was Sonia Sotomayor, who later became a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 working under professor Sheldon Hackney. He joined the History faculty at the University of Illinois, rising to full professor.

Burton has authored more than a hundred articles and wrote or edited fourteen books. His dissertation was published in 1985 by the University of North Carolina Press as In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. It became the subject of sessions at the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association's annual meetings. He wrote The Age of Lincoln, winner of the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for non-fiction. With civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner in 2021, Burton published Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, a lengthy survey of race-related cases on the US Supreme Court.

Honors and awards At Illinois Burton won teaching awards at the department, school, college, and campus levels and received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement.

In 2002 Burton served as president of the Agricultural History Society. He served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 2012. He was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education). He received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teacher Award for 2003.