Research Interests for Elizabeth A Fenn

Elizabeth Fenn received her undergraduate degree at Duke in 1981 and returned here to teach in 2002. Her field of study is early North America, focusing particularly on epidemic disease, Native American history, and social history. Her aim is to develop a continent-wide analysis that incorporates Native Americans as well as African, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian colonizers into a narrative that reflects the demographic and geographic realities of the early contact era.

Fenn’s 2001 book Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill and Wang), unearthed the devastating effects of a terrible smallpox epidemic that coursed across the North American continent during the years of the American Revolution. Her current book project, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (Hill and Wang, forthcoming), analyzes the experience of North Dakota's Mandan Indians from 1100 to 1845.

Keywords:

smallpox, American Revolution, Mandan Indians, biological warfare

Areas of Interest:

Epidemic disease
Early North America
Native American

Recent Publications

1. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Review of Pox: An American History, by Michael Willrich, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 85 (Forthcoming, Winter 2011)
2. Elizabeth A. Fenn, "Population Collapse in Early North Dakota: The Mandans, 1500-1838", in Contested Spaces in the Americas, edited by Edward Countryman (forthcoming), Clements Center for Southwestern Studies in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3. Elizabeth A. Fenn, "Contemplating Contagion," review of Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715, Common-Place, vol. 8, no. 4 (July 2008) [fenn.shtml]
4. Elizabeth A. Fenn, "A Revolutionary Contagion: Smallpox and the Reshaping of the American West, 1779–82", in When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turning Points, edited by Pekka Hämäläinen (2006), pp. 45-80, Helsinki University Press
5. Elizabeth A. Fenn, "Diseases", in The Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War, edited by Gregory Fremont-Barnes and Richard A. Ryerson, vol. 1 (2006), pp. 360-362, ABC-CLIO