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Elizabeth A. Fenn
Born	(1959-09-22) September 22, 1959 (age 65) Arlington, California, U.S.
Alma mater	Duke University Yale University
Occupation	Historian
Notable work	Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Spouse	Peter H. Wood ​(m. 1999)​
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for History

Elizabeth Anne Fenn (born September 22, 1959) is an American historian. Her book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History. She serves as the Walter S. and Lucienne Driskill chair in Western American History at University of Colorado-Boulder.

Career

Fenn received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history (with honors) from Duke University in 1981, then attended Yale University, finishing her master's degree in 1985. Fenn originally planned to write her dissertation on millenarianism in Native American culture, but left her doctoral program at Yale before it was finished, as she was "bored" with academia. Fenn entered the auto mechanic program at Durham Technical Community College and worked as a mechanic around the Durham, North Carolina, area for eight years before returning to Yale in 1995 to complete her studies. Pox Americana, her dissertation about the 1775–82 North American smallpox epidemic, was written while working part-time, and completed in 1999. Fenn was interviewed on multiple national news outlets about biological warfare after the September 11 attacks.

Fenn won the 2004 Cox Book Prize for her work Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782. She received the Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2019.

Prior to joining the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, Fenn taught at George Washington University from 1999 to 2002 and Duke from 2002 to 2012.

She married Peter H. Wood in 1999.

Works

• ——; Wood, Peter H. (1983). Natives & Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina Before 1770. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4101-3.
• —— (October 2, 2002). Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4668-0804-1.
• —— (March 11, 2014). Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-374-71107-8.

References

1. ^ Elmes, John (May 28, 2015). "Q&A with Elizabeth Fenn". Times Higher Education. Retrieved August 12, 2015.
2. Kuta, Sarah (April 20, 2015). "Elizabeth Fenn, CU-Boulder prof and Longmont resident, wins Pulitzer Prize for history". The Daily Camera. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
3. Evans, Clay (December 2011). "Former auto mechanic makes splash in world of history". University of Colorado at Boulder. Archived from the original on October 13, 2015. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
4. Eakin, Emily (September 8, 2001). "She Can Fix Your Engine, Too". The New York Times. Retrieved November 11, 2015.
5. ^ Hicks, Sally (August 30, 2002). "Scholar Trades Wrenches For Writing". Duke University. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
6. "Cox Book Prize". Society of the Cincinnati. Archived from the original on 7 November 2018. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
7. Talbott, Clint (August 29, 2019). "Pulitzer-winning historian gets NEH award for book on Sacagawea". Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. Retrieved February 22, 2020.
8. "CU-Boulder history chair wins Pulitzer Prize for her book". University of Colorado at Boulder. April 20, 2015. Archived from the original on April 25, 2015. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
9. Sounart, Christie (April 22, 2015). "Fenn Wins Pulitzer". Colorandan Magazine. Archived from the original on November 17, 2015. Retrieved November 11, 2015.
10. Martin, James Kirby (2003). "Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (review)". Journal of Social History. 37 (1): 268–270. doi:10.1353/jsh.2003.0148. S2CID 201761357 – via Project MUSE.
11. Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. (October 4, 2002). "Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (review)". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 57 (4): 497–499. doi:10.1093/jhmas/57.4.497 – via Project MUSE.
12. Richter, Daniel K. (April 4, 2014). "Book Review: 'Encounters at the Heart of the World' by Elizabeth A. Fenn". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 26, 2015.

External links

• Faculty page at CU Boulder
• Appearances on C-SPAN

v t e Pulitzer Prize for History (2001–2025)
Joseph J. Ellis (2001) Louis Menand (2002) Rick Atkinson (2003) Steven Hahn (2004) David Hackett Fischer (2005) David Oshinsky (2006) Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (2007) Daniel Walker Howe (2008) Annette Gordon-Reed (2009) Liaquat Ahamed (2010) Eric Foner (2011) Manning Marable (2012) Fredrik Logevall (2013) Alan Taylor (2014) Elizabeth A. Fenn (2015) T. J. Stiles (2016) Heather Ann Thompson (2017) Jack E. Davis (2018) David W. Blight (2019) W. Caleb McDaniel (2020) Marcia Chatelain (2021) Nicole Eustace / Ada Ferrer (2022)
Complete list 1917–1925 1926–1950 1951–1975 1976–2000 2001–2025

• 1959 births
• Living people
• American women historians
• 20th-century American historians
• 21st-century American historians
• Duke University Trinity College of Arts and Sciences alumni
• Yale University alumni
• Duke University faculty
• George Washington University faculty
• University of Colorado Boulder faculty
• Pulitzer Prize for History winners
• Historians of Native Americans
• Mechanics (people)
• Durham Technical Community College alumni
• Writers from Riverside, California
• 20th-century American women writers
• 21st-century American women writers
• Historians from California
• People from Longmont, Colorado