Elisabeth Leake trained as a historian at Yale University and Cambridge, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2013. She then held a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, London, before working as Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds.
She is now the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History and Associate Professor of History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Her first book, The Defiant Border: The Afghan–Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Her major new history of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Afghan Crucible, is published by OUP.