Susan Pedersen is a Canadian

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

, and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Pedersen focuses on 19th and 20th century British history, women's history,

settler colonialism Settler colonialism is a structure that perpetuates the elimination of Indigenous people and cultures to replace them with a settler society. Some, but not all, scholars argue that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal. It may be enacted ...

, and the history of international institutions.

Life

Born a Canadian citizen and raised in Japan, she received her B.A. (1982) from Radcliffe College and both her M.A. (1983) and Ph.D (1989) from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, where she was also a professor and served as the university's Dean of Undergraduate Education. In the latter position, she defended the university against charges of excessive

grade inflation Grade inflation (also known as grading leniency) is the awarding of higher grades than students deserve, which yields a higher average grade given to students. The term is also used to describe the tendency to award progressively higher academic ...

. Pedersen joined the Columbia faculty in 2003. Among her works is a biography of Eleanor Rathbone. She also recently completed a book on the

mandate system A League of Nations mandate was a legal status for certain territories transferred from the control of one country to another following World War I, or the legal instruments that contained the internationally agreed-upon terms for administ ...

of the

League of Nations The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ...

; in 2005 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to assist with research on this project. Susan Pedersen was Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...

, for Spring 2009. She was elected a fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...

in 2020.

Works

*''The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire'' (

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, 2015), winner of the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature. *

Caroline Elkins Caroline Elkins (American, born Caroline Fox, 1969) is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School ...

, Susan Pedersen (eds) ''Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century'',

Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...

, 2005, , * * * *"National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making," ''

The Journal of Modern History ''The Journal of Modern History'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering European intellectual, political, and cultural history, published by the University of Chicago Press. Established in 1929, the journal covers events from appr ...

'' Vol. 63, No. 4, December 1991 *"Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War," ''

The American Historical Review ''The American Historical Review'' is a quarterly academic history journal and the official publication of the American Historical Association. It targets readers interested in all periods and facets of history and has often been described as the ...

'' Vol. 95, No. 4, October 1990 *"Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England," ''

Journal of British Studies The publication of thNorth American Conference on British Studies ''The Journal of British Studies'' is an academic journal aimed at scholars of British culture from the Middle Ages through the present. The journal was co-founded in 1961 by Geor ...

'' 25 (January 1986): 84-113.

References

External links

NPR interview with Susan Pedersen on grade inflation at Harvard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pedersen, Susan 1959 births Living people Harvard University alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Columbia University faculty 20th-century Canadian historians Radcliffe College alumni 21st-century Canadian historians Fellows of the Royal Historical Society Fellows of the British Academy