Elizabeth Prevost, Dissertation Fellow

Dissertation Fellowship, 2003

Elizabeth Prevost Alumnae Dissertation Fellow, 2003

I am a historian specializing in modern Britain & the British Empire, sub-Saharan Africa, women & gender, and global Christianity. I earned my B.A. at Trinity College in 1996 and my PhD at Northwestern in 2006. Since 2004 I have been a member of the faculty at Grinnell College, IA, and I am currently beginning my third year as chair of the History Department. I also serve on the Executive Committee of the North American Conference of British Studies. When I am not writing, researching, and teaching, I enjoy choral singing, travel, good food, and summers by the sea. My spouse is a fellow historian and we have a 4-year old daughter.

Impact of the Alumnae Dissertation Fellowship In 2010 I published my dissertation as a monograph, The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole, with Oxford University Press, and it has been reviewed favorably in a number of journals and periodicals. The support of the Alumnae Dissertation Fellowship was absolutely critical to the completion of the dissertation and then book, and I will always be immensely grateful to The Alumnae of Northwestern for that opportunity. My graduate school years at NU were deeply formative to my personal and intellectual journey, and this month (May 2015), I will gather with a group of former History graduate students back in Harris Hall to honor the retirement of Alex Owen, an indefatigable adviser and mentor who taught us what it means to be a women's and gender historian. It's quite astonishing to consider the many strong and talented women whose company I share as an Alumnae Fellow, and I will continue to endeavor to make my career a worthy testimony to that legacy.