Dr Elizabeth Banks
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Contact details
- Email: elizabeth.banks@ed.ac.uk
Availability
I do not have drop-in hours this semester. Feel free to email me to make an appointment.
Background
Elizabeth (Betty) Banks is a global historian with regional training in Russia/USSR and twentieth century Africa, and interests in gender, economics, and environment. Her first book The End of Cold War Solidarity: Mozambique and the Soviet Union in the Age of Decolonization is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Her current project, Cold War Cod: Environments, Technologies, and the Politics of Fishing, explores Soviet fishing and other uses of the oceans during the second half of the twentieth century.
She completed her PhD at New York University and spent several years a research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence before joining Edinburgh's School of History, Classics and Archaeology as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2024.
Undergraduate teaching
This year I am teaching "Collapse: The End of the Soviet Union and What Came Next", and "Global Connections since 1450".
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
No
The End of Cold War Solidarity: Mozambique and the Soviet Union in the Age of Decolonization (monograph forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, scheduled for January 2027)
"Expanding the Pool of Knowledge: Learning from the Soviet Economy at the UN Regional Commission for Europe and Beyond," Contemporary European History 35, e5 (2026):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777325100969 (open access)
"What is Socialist Globalization Good For?", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 26.4 (2025): 873-89.
“The Ruble Lever: Soviet Development Knowledge and the Political Economy of the UN,” Journal of Global History 20.1 (March 2025): 103-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022824000044 (open access)
"Les origines soviétiques de la puissance économique russe en Afrique," Le Grand Continent (March 2024): https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2024/03/16/les-origines-sovietiques-de-la-puissance-economique-russe-en-afrique/ (also in Spanish at the same address)
“Economic Decolonization and International Economic Thinking at the UN Regional Commission for Africa (UNECA): A Research Agenda” EUI Working Papers History Series 2022/03 http://hdl.handle.net/1814/74410 (April 2022). (open access)
“Sewing Machines for Socialism?: Development Aid and Political Difference between the Soviet and Mozambican Women’s Committees 1972-89,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 41.1 (May 2021): 27-40.
“Introduction: The African-Soviet Modern,” (with Robyn d’Avignon and Asif Siddiqi) in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 41.1, (May 2021): 2-10.
“Learning to Vote in Mozambique,” The Hoover Digest 2018: 2 (Spring 2018): 200-13.