Faculty Fellow Elisabeth Köll was featured in Women Lead 2019, a Notre Dame initiative to celebrate International Women's Day by highlighting the work of seven influential faculty members. After growing up in Germany, Köll made the unique decision to study Chinese history, business, and economics through an exchange program at Fudan University in Shanghai and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. As a professor of history, she is excited by the Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters' efforts to bring the social sciences and humanities closer together because it allows her to study Chinese institutions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Köll encouraged rising scholars to pursue research that they are passionate about and said, “One of my undergraduate professors said that in the end, all our studying and teaching and researching happens so that we can all understand each other a little better...Keeping that agenda going is important to me.”