'I didn't even know I was a finalist,' Pulitzer winner says

By Christie Sounart

The news of a lifetime reached Elizabeth Fenn, chair of CU-Boulder’s history department, around 1 p.m. on April 20, just as she sat at her desk to eat her lunch from the University Memorial Center. An email from a New York Times reporter caught her attention: It said she’d won a Pulitzer Prize.

After a quick Google search, Fenn still didn’t fully believe it.

“I was quite shocked by what I found, and I wasn’t sure I was seeing things right,” she says.

I was blown away by what I learned about these enormous plains populations. They deserve to be a part of our early American canon.”Fenn, who goes by “Lil,” ran to the office of a colleague, who confirmed she wasn’t dreaming: Fenn had won the prize in the history category for her 2014 book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, a 10-year project detailing the history of the Mandan people, a Plains Indian tribe who lived in what is now North Dakota.

When Fenn, an associate professor, got back to her office, there was a voicemail from her book editor. Her phone was blowing up. Her first call was to her husband of 16 years, historian and emeritus professor at Duke University, Peter Wood.

By the next day, her lunch still sat on her desk, uneaten.

“It’s overwhelming,” she says. “I never envisioned myself winning. I didn’t even know I was a finalist.”

Fenn, 56, is believed to be the first CU-Boulder faculty member to win a Pulitzer Prize. It comes just two years after New York Times reporter John Branch (Mktg’89, MJour’96) won a Pulitzer in feature writing for his story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Runnel Creek.”



“The arts and humanities at CU are so fabulously strong right now,” Fenn says. “It’s an amazing place to be.”

Fenn joined CU in 2012 after working at Duke for 10 years. Her favorite class to teach is a large survey lecture on United States history to 1865.

Her research specialty is the early American West, specifically epidemic disease, Native Americans and environmental history. An interest in the period took hold early: As a Duke undergraduate she wrote her senior honors essay on Native Americans in the Hudson Bay fur trade.

“One of the things I like so much about the early American period and the American West is that we don’t have reams and reams of evidence,” she says. “It allows us to speculate.”

Encounters at the Heart of the World, published by Hill and Wang, was inspired by Fenn’s research for her 2001 book about the smallpox epidemic during the American Revolution, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. The arrival of Europeans in the West proved disastrous for the Mandans, the tribe Lewis and Clark stayed with during the winter of 1804-05. They were afflicted with a host of infectious diseases and rodents from Europe, the demolition of their woodlands for steamboat fuel and force from enemies newly equipped with horses.

“I was blown away by what I learned about these enormous plains populations,” says Fenn. “They deserve to be a part of our early American canon.”

Writing has been a part of Fenn’s life since childhood. One writer in particular inspires her: the late French author Jean Giono, who penned The Horseman on the Roof, a novel detailing a nobleman’s journey home during a cholera epidemic.

“It inspired me to write something beautiful about something terrible,” she says, referring to her book Pox Americana.

During the decade she worked on Encounters, Fenn mostly wrote in the summer. She read archaeology, epidemiology and geology, visited areas of North Dakota, met with Mandans and more. One of her biggest challenges in the book was accurately reporting the tribe’s spirituality, she says. As a self-described atheist, Fenn accepted coaching on the subject from a Mandan Turtle Priest, Cedric Red Feather, an expert on the tribe’s history, stories and ceremonies.

“Had he not done what he did, this book would have been very different,” she says. “He helped me understand how important Mandan spirituality is in understanding the way Mandans inhabit the world.”

Fenn is pleased that her book is bringing recognition to the period of time before Christopher Columbus’ visit to America.

“This is just a wonderful moment for the Mandan people to get the historical recognition they deserve,” she says. “It says Native Americans matter. Native American history is American history.”

Her colleagues are as impressed by the work and the person as much as by the prize.

“Using a diverse array of innovative research methods, Lil had done what many thought impossible for lack of conventional historical sources,” says Paul Sutter, associate professor at CU and director of graduate studies in history. “She wove together a complex history of the Mandan people before, during and immediately after European contact, a history that placed the Mandan at the very center of the economic and environmental networks that both pulled together Native North America and then helped to tear it apart.”

Christie Sounart is associate editor of the Coloradan.

April 24, 2015