Dr.  Burton is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson Cyber Institute. From 2013-2015 he was Creativity Professor of Humanities; in 2016 received the Clemson Dean's Award for Research in the College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities, and in 2018 received the initial University Research, Scholarship and Artistic Achievement Award. From 2008-2010, he was the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. At the University of Illinois, he continues to chair the I-CHASS advisory board and is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002-2010. He serves as Executive Director of the College of Charleston's Low Country and Atlantic World Program (CLAW). Burton served as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, 2009-2017. In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois. A recognized expert on race relations and the American South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton is often invited to present lectures, conduct workshops, and consult with colleges, universities, and granting agencies.

Burton is a prolific author and scholar (twenty authored or edited books and more than two hundred articles); and author or director of numerous digital humanities projects.  The Age of Lincoln (2007) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, "If the Civil War era was America's 'Iliad,' then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer." The book was featured at sessions of the annual meetings of African American History and Life Association, the Social Science History Association, the Southern Intellectual History Circle, and the latter was the basis for a forum published in The Journal of the Historical Society . His In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985) was featured at sessions of the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association annual meetings.  The Age of Lincoln and In My Fathers' House were nominated for Pulitzers. His most recent book, is Penn Center: A History Preserved   (2014).

Recognized for his teaching, Burton 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). In 2004 he received the American Historical Association's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize. At the University of Illinois he won teaching awards at the department, school, college, and campus levels. He was the recipient of the 2001-2002 Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award and received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement from the University of Illinois. He was appointed an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2004-16. He was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia on October 13, 2022 during the annual conference of Morehouse’s College of Ministers and Laity.

Burton's research and teaching interests include the American South, especially race relations and community, and the intersection of humanities and social sciences. He has served as president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society. He was elected to honorary life membership in BRANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century Historians).

Among his honors are fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, the U.S. Department of Education, National Park Service, and the Carnegie Foundation. He was a Pew National Fellow Carnegie Scholar for 2000-2001. He was elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Burton was elected into the S.C. Academy of Authors in 2015 and in 2017 received the Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council.

• Toward A New South? Studies in Post-Civil War Southern Communities (Greenwood, 1982) coeditor with Robert C. McMath, Jr.
• Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Greenwood, 1982), coeditor with Robert C. McMath, Jr.

• In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1987) 

• A Gentleman and an Officer: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War (1996)

• Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2002), editor. 

• The Free Flag of Cuba: The Lost Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens (2002) coeditor with Georganne B. Burton, 

• The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 2008) 

• Toward the meeting of the waters: Currents in the civil rights movement of South Carolina during the twentieth century. (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2008), coeditor with Winfred B. Moore. 
•  Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney. Montgomery: New South Books. (2013) (co-editor with Raymond Arsenault)
• Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2021) (with Armand Derfner)

"Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina." Journal of Social History 12.1 (1978): 31-56.

"Using the Computer and Manuscript Census Returns to Teach American Social History." History Teacher 13#1 (Nov., 1979), pp. 71-88 online

"Anatomy of an Antebellum Rural Free Black Community: Social Structure and Social Interaction in Edgefield District, South Carolina, 1850–1860." Southern Studies 21.3 (1982): 294-325.

"Edgefield Reconstruction: Political Black Leaders." Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1988), pp. 27-38.

“Developing Computer Assisted Instructional (CAI) Materials in the American History Surveys.” The History Teacher 24#1 (1990), pp. 67–78. coauthor with Terence Finnegan. online

"The Modern 'New' South in a Postmodern Academy: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 62#4 (1996), pp. 767–86. online

"African American Status and Identity in a Postbellum Community: An Analysis of the Manuscript Census Returns" Agricultural History 72#2 (1998), pp. 213-240 online

"Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History." Agricultural History 76.4 (2002): 631-658. online, presidential address to Agricultural History Society.

"Lucy Holcombe Pickens, Southern Writer." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 103.4 (2002): 296-324, with Georganne B. Burton. online

"American digital history." Social Science Computer Review 23.2 (2005): 206-220.

"Author's Response to the Southern Intellectual History Circle Forum on The Age of Lincoln." Journal of the Historical Society (2009) 9#3 pp. 355-372. online

"The South as 'Other,' the Southerner as Stranger." Journal of Southern History, 79 (Feb. 2013), 7–50. his 2012 presidential address to Southern Historical Association online