About the Center

Gera Burton, Ph.D.

Associate Director of Continuing Education, Center for Distance and Independent Study

Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2002		Latin-American and Afro-Hispanic Literature
M.A., University of Missouri, 1996		Spanish Literature
M.Ed., University of Missouri, 1986
B. Comm, National University of Ireland (NUI) (Dublin)
Higher Diploma in Education (NUI) (Dublin)

A native of Ireland with a teaching background in Dublin, Gera Burton is a founder-member and former President of the American Association for Collegiate Independent Study (AACIS)—an organization devoted to serving non-traditional students in higher education. Her research interests center on nineteenth-century Cuba, Ireland, colonialism, and the abolitionist movement. She has shared the results of her research at academic conferences nationally and internationally. Her book Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Francisco Manzano and Richard Robert Madden was published by Peter Lang, Inc. in 2004. Her current project is a biography of the Irish abolitionist, Richard Robert Madden.