Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College, where she teaches courses on race, slavery, and her father, comedic legend Richard Pryor.

She is the award-winning author of the article “The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” and the 2016 book Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War.

Her viral TED Talk on why it’s hard to talk about the N-word has been viewed more than two million times.