CU Boulder, Carbondale Arts, and the Carbondale Branch Library present CU Carbondale, a series of lectures by CU Boulder professors. This month's speaker will be Professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Fenn. Professor Fenn is the Walter and Lucienne Driskill Professor of Western American History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her field of study is the early American West, focusing on epidemic disease, Native American, and environmental history. Elizabeth Fenn received a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for "Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People." She is also the author of "Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82." She lives in Longmont, Colorado, and chairs the History Department at CU Boulder.

Elizabeth Fenn's illustrated slide-lecture derives from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Encounters at the Heart of the World, which tells the story of North Dakota’s Mandan Indians. Widely known for hosting Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804-05, the Mandans proved resilient and adaptable in the face of challenges that included epidemics of smallpox and whooping cough and invasions of Norway rats.

Fenn's 2001 book "Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82," unearthed the devastating effects of a smallpox epidemic that coursed across the North American continent during the years of the American Revolution. In 2014, Fenn published "Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People," which analyzes Mandan Indian history from 1100 to 1845. Fenn is now at work on an expansive biography of Sakagawea, using her life story to illuminate the wider history of the northern plains and Rockies. Fenn is also the coauthor, with Peter H. Wood, of "Natives and Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770," a popular history of early North Carolina which appeared in 1983. In April 2015, she was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, “Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.”