Elizabeth Pryor is the Associate Professor of History at Smith College and the award-winning author of The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North and a 2016 monograph entitled Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. Her TED talk on the n-word inspired her memoir There Will Be No Laughing in This House—a meditation on biracial identity and her relationship with her father, comedic icon, Richard Pryor. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and on the Advisory Council for the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.