Elizabeth White Nelson is associate professor of history and graduate coordinator. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and received her master's and doctoral degree in american studies from Yale University (1995).

Since coming to UNLV in 1996, she has taught courses in American history on the National Period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture and graduate courses on nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history and cultural theory. She is the author of Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in 19th-Century America (Smithsonian Books, 2004) and articles on nineteenth-century American culture as well as a contributor to Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds. The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (Routledge, 2000). She is currently working on the relationship between political economy, domestic economy and national identity in the antebellum United States.