Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a leading scholar in women’s studies, founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University, and a professor of humanities there, died on Tuesday at the age of 65 (see obituary in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Her 1988 book, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (University of North Carolina Press), won several prizes for women’s history. In the latter part of her career, she turned away from radical roots and became a well-known conservative public intellectual, opponent of abortion, critic of what she saw as the politicization and specialization of the academic humanities, and convert to Roman Catholicism.

In 1998 she and her husband, the historian Eugene D. Genovese, helped found the Historical Society as an alternative to what they said was the overspecialization and fragmentation of history represented in the established historical organizations and their journals. She was the first editor of The Journal of the Historical Society and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bush in 2003.