Cynthia Prescott: Wise & Courageous

Welcome to The Wise & Courageous Podcast, where we host conversations with women leaders about how they are seeking and engaging wisdom and courage in their leadership and work in this unique season.

“It took courage for me to transform myself from somebody who was comfortable in the background doing safe research to doing something much more controversial in the public eye.” — Cynthia Prescott

Cynthia Prescott, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota joins Nancy Pedulla on The Wise and Courageous Podcast for a conversation about leadership. 

What happens when the research you are doing suddenly takes up more space in public exploration and debate? In this conversation with Cindy, opportunities to lead in the research sphere and in the university invite a new sense of identity as a leader and require growing in courage and wisdom.

Cynthia Culver Prescott is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History & American Indian Studies and of the Anthropology department. Dr. Prescott’s work focuses on gender in the American West. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, race, social class, and historical memory.

For the purposes of this podcast, we are defining leadership as the stewardship of people, culture and purpose, guiding and serving others toward a shared vision or outcomes.

Welcome to the conversation!

You can listen on iTunes or at The Women Scholars & Professionals Podcast. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform, or click through to listen to our interview with Cindy on:

• iTunes

• Spotify

• Podbean

If you'd like to support the work of InterVarsity's Women Scholars & Professionals, including future podcasts such as this episode, you can do so at givetoiv.org/wsap. Thank you for listening!

Further resources for this interview:

• Cindy’s page at her university

Dr. Cynthia Culver Prescott is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History & American Indian Studies and of the Anthropology department.

Dr. Prescott’s work focuses on gender in the American West. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, race, social class, and historical memory. Her first book, Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (University of Arizona, 2007), traced changing gender roles and ideology among early white settlers in Oregon between 1845 and 1900.

Her second book, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) won the 2020 Gita Chaudhuri Prize and the 2020 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award. In it, she traces changing portrayals of race, gender and national identity in pioneer monuments erected from 1890 to the present. Her companion website, Pioneer Monuments in the American West, features interactive maps and timelines, and provides images and information about the 200 monuments included in her study. Supported by a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Seed Grant, she is using the GIS-enabled app Clio to create detailed historical entries and walking tours of those monuments, with an emphasis on controversial public monuments and shifting representations of race and gender.

Prescott is co-editor (with Janne Lahti) of Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History (Routledge, 2024), which is a reprint of a Journal of Genocide Research Special Issue on Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History vol. 24, no. 4 (2022).

Prescott also is co-editor (with Maureen S. Thompson) of, and a contributor to, Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook (The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2021), which combines scholarship on rural foodways with heritage recipes and their backstories. Prescott is also interested in quilting, particularly examining quilts as a reflection of women’s work roles and social class status.

A member of the History Department since 2007, Dr. Prescott teaches several courses that are closely related to her research interests, including American women and gender, the American West, cultural history, and material culture methodology, as well as the introductory United States since 1877 survey course. She particularly enjoys utilizing Reacting to the Past (RTTP) intensive role-playing games to train students to think, speak and write critically about the past. These RTTP games feature prominently in two of her courses: “Slaves, Citizens and Social Change” and “Monuments, Museums and Memory.”

Prescott is drawing on her ongoing research to develop a new RTTP game centered on debates about whether to preserve, relocate, or remove San Francisco’s controversial Pioneer Monument, and how to reinterpret that monument. “Memory Reconsidered: San Francisco Pioneer Monument, 1991-96” is currently undergoing play-testing at UND and other universities across the country.

While her academic training is in social history, Prescott has also worked in several areas of public history: museum curatorship, collections management, archival and rare book cataloging, and historic preservation. She is also active in UND’s Women & Gender Studies program and leads the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship faculty and staff group. Beyond UND, she is co-chair of the Rural Women’s Studies Association and active in several international historical societies. She serves as an Affiliate Fellow with the University of Nebraska’s Center for Great Plains Studies and Associate Fellow with the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.