Elyssa Ford, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, director of the public history & museum studies program at Northwest, and is the president of the Nodaway County Historical Society.

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She is a historian of the US West and a gender & sexuality studies scholar. Her first book Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion (2020) examines the power of rodeo in American history and looks specifically at race- and group-specific rodeos, such as Black and Native American rodeo circuits. Her second book is co-authored with Rebecca Scofield, Ph.D., from the University of Idaho, and will be released Fall 2023. Slapping Leather studies the gay rodeo in the US. 

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Ford also is a local historian and has published extensively about the Missouri and the Midwest. She has written about women's suffrage in the Midwest for the National Park Service and Black women in Kansas City for the Middle West Review and has worked with undergraduate classes to write biographies about suffrage leaders in Missouri. Her own work on women in Nodaway County has appeared in the Missouri Historical Review, including a piece about women's suffrage activity in Nodaway County. Her article "Fine Herds of Cattle': Rural Nuns and Farmwork at a Missouri Convent, 1874-1963" won the 2022 Missouri Historical Review Article Award from the State Historical Society of Missouri.

 

Contact the Project:

ebford@nwmissouri.edu