Elizabeth Hopkins, a graduate of Wellesley College, received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1968. Before joining the Smith faculty in 1966, she taught anthropology for two years at Columbia College. She has been a research assistant in the Columbia School of Law, a research Associate with the Bureau of Applied Social Research, and a Senior Research Associate of the East African Institute of Social Research. A political anthropologist, she has conducted field work in the mountainous border areas of southwestern Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire and has done extensive archival research in private papers in Oxford and in the official records of the British Foreign Office in London and in the administrative and court records of Uganda. Her research emphasis has been on the early imperial period (1895-1930) and the political field which engaged African, administrator and missionary in a complex contest for local administrative control, cultural hegemony, and continuing autonomy.

Her publications include Social Systems and Family Patterns (with William J.Goode and Helen McClure), The Politics of Conquest: The Nile-Congo Divide, 1890-1930 (in press), "Racial minorities in East Africa" (The Transformation fo East Africa: Studies in Political Anthropology); "The international boundary as a factor in colonial control" (Eastern African History); "The Nyabingi cult of southwestern Uganda" (Protest and Power in Black Africa, 1886-1966); "The politics of crime: patterns of aggression and control in a colonial contest" (American Anthropologist); "Partition in practice: African politics and Europian rivalry in Bufumbira" (Bismarck, Europe, and Africa); "The ethnography of conquest" (Critical Anthropology: The Ethnology of Stanley Diamond); "The pragmatics of repression: prophetism as an imperial strategy" (Journal of Religion in Africa). In addition to her work in British colonial history, She is interested in the more general problems of social change and urbanization in the third world, the sociobiology of gender, the role of ritual power in political action, and the cult as an instrument of identity and change.