Elizabeth Prevost

Elizabeth Prevost, Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History, is a historian of modern Britain and the Empire/Commonwealth; colonial Africa; global Christianity; women and gender; and reading, publishing, and literary celebrity. She is the author of The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (Oxford University Press, 2010), and related pieces on religious encounters and feminism in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. More recently, she has published work on the gender politics of colonialism and indirect rule between the world wars, including a prize-winning article in the 2017 Journal of Modern History. Her current research, which investigates British detective fiction as a product of global crisis and transformation, has appeared in British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions (Palgrave Macmillan Crime Files, 2022, co-edited with Laura E. Nym Mayhall), and is forthcoming in Agatha Christie’s Armchair: The Global Making of British Mystery (under contract with Oxford).

Prevost has held residential awards and fellowships at the National History Center and Library of Congress (as a member of the 2010 Mellon International Seminar on Decolonization), the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London (as the 2013 Henry Charles Chapman Fellow), the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi (as visiting lecturer and scholar in 2014), and the Newberry Library in Chicago (as co-director, with Ralph Savarese, of the 2019 ACM Research in the Humanities Seminar). From 2013 to 2020 she served on the Executive Committee of the North American Conference on British Studies.

At Grinnell she teaches courses on the Great War, Modern Britain and the Empire, Modern Africa, and Decolonization.