Rate My Professor Elizabeth Propes

Elizabeth Propes is Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at Tennessee Technological University, where she joined the faculty in 2010. Holding a Ph.D., she specializes in France, Modern Europe, China, Africa, and historical methods. Propes has significantly expanded the department's curriculum, filling key gaps in European history from the Reformation aftermath through the French Revolution. She developed courses in modern French history, modern German history including the Holocaust, took over the History of China course, and introduced a new African history course emphasizing Francophone Africa in 2011. Additional offerings include Western Civilization in Maymester format since 2014 and upper-division Maymester courses in 2016 and 2017. She taught the Senior Seminar on Europe Since 1968 in spring 2023. Propes has led numerous study abroad experiences, including trips to Paris in 2014 and 2017, a month-long excursion to Poland in 2015 with colleagues, a domestic trip through Georgia and South Carolina in 2013 where students met President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and accompaniment of a Foreign Languages group to Morocco in 2018.

Propes is tenured and actively engaged in university service and professional organizations. She chaired the Ohio Valley History Conference hosted by the department in 2016, organizing 23 panels and 61 papers. She has served on the College of Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee, TTU Fulbright Committee, Faculty Senate, and as president of the TTU chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Propes assisted in transforming the Honors Program into the Honors College and currently chairs tenure and promotion committees. Externally, she serves on the Program Committee for the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association and is the 2026 Program Chair. She is a certified departmental reviewer for IRB applications and scores Tennessee Board of Regents Dual Credit Exams in World History. Propes participated in a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum panel on Questions of Complicity in 2018 and presented on 'Rebuilding the Promised Land in France: Zionism and the Reintegration of Alsace and Lorraine, 1920' at the Southern Historical Association. Her scholarly contributions include book reviews in H-France and the International Review of Social History.