Biography

Elizabeth (Betty) Banks is transnational historian of the Soviet Union and twentieth century Africa. She received her PhD from New York University. From February 2021, she is a research fellow in the ERC-funded ECOINT program at the EUI. From spring 2024, she will be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Her current research explores how technical experts from East and West were able to plan economic life together in UN institutions and working groups, even as their respective economic languages at times sounded like ideology to one another. A second project, drawing on her training in African history, examines the practices of economic decolonization in the regional economic commission for Africa (UNECA). From 2024, she will focus on a new project, Cold War Cod, an international history of industrial fishing.

She is additionally finalizing her book manuscript, Parallel Worlds: Socialist Globalization in the Soviet Union and Mozambique, which explores the ideological ideal of socialist solidarity was into practice by leaders, bureaucrats and ordinary citizens in Mozambique, the USSR, and the spaces in between. Her co-edited special issue, “The African-Soviet Modern,” appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (issue 41.1).