Caroline Elkins

Who is Caroline Elkins?

Caroline Elkins is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her most noted publication, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It also was the basis for successful claims by former Mau Mau detainees against the British government for crimes committed in the detention camps of Kenya in the 1950s. Elkins served as expert witness from the time of the claimant's filing of their case in 2009 until it was settled in June 2013. In addition to her award-winning work on colonial Kenya, Elkins also studies the colonial encounter in Africa during the twentieth century, as well as in many parts of the former British Empire including Malaya, Singapore, Cyprus, and Zimbabwe. She has won numerous other fellowships and awards, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies.