Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor writes, teaches, and engages questions on race and racism in the U.S. as an Associate Professor of History at Smith College, focusing specifically on African American activism in the 19th century and how historical ideologies on race inform contemporary discourse. Her award-winning research centers on the etymology of the n-word and the complicated and corrosive idea behind the word. She speaks frequently on television, podcasts, and on stage about her work. She was recently featured by TED for her talk, "The N-Word in the Classroom."

Pryor’s first book, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War, is a social history of 19th century African American activists who fought against segregation on public vehicles and elevated public transportation as an equal rights matter, over a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

Pryor’s essay, “The Etymology of [n-word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” won the Ralph D. Gray Prize for Best Article of 2016 in the Journal of the Early Republic. She is currently writing her second book, to be published by Simon & Schuster imprint 37 INK. This new book is a historical and pedagogical study of the n-word framed, in part, by her experience as a biracial woman in the United States and as the daughter of iconic comedian Richard Pryor.

In the classroom, Pryor explores questions of citizenship, race and racism and the history of U.S. slavery, looking carefully at how enslaved people's histories are remembered and who remembers them. Her classes are designed to help students make connections between the anti-blackness of the past and in the present. Pryor is a 2016 recipient of the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching at Smith College.

As Smith College’s Faculty Teaching Mentor for Inclusive and Equitable Pedagogies, Pryor conducts faculty workshops on navigating the n-word and other racist language in the classroom. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Organization of American Historians.