Diane Mutti Burke is a native Kansas Citian, who earned her BA from Dartmouth College (1990) and MA and PhD from Emory University (2004). She is a historian of the American South and the Civil War with a particular interest in the history of slavery, women, and the Missouri/Kansas border region. Her award-winning first book, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 2010), examines how geographic location and size of slaveholding altered the experiences of slavery for both enslaved people and those who claimed them. She also co-edited two volumes of scholarship on the Missouri/Kansas border region, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border (2013) and Wide-Open Town: Kansas City during the Pendergast Era (2018), both published by the University Press of Kansas.
Mutti Burke is a Professor of History and a Member of the Associate Faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She teaches a range of US History topics, including courses on the Civil War, the American South, and the History of US Women. She is dedicated to bringing the history of this region to public audiences and was awarded the 2015 Missouri Humanities Council Literary Achievement Award in recognition of her contribution to enriching the understanding of Missouri’s history and culture. She is currently directing the Kansas City Monuments Coalition, which is funded by a $4 million Mellon Monuments grant and aims to tell a more expansive history of Kansas City in collaboration with fourteen community partners, and is working on a book project that focuses on the experiences of refugee populations during the American Civil War.
