Elizabeth A. Fenn

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.

Works