She has co-authored a two-volume history: Cape Town. The Making of a City, and Cape Town in the Twentieth Century and is an Honorary Research Associate in the History Department, University of Stellenbosch.
This social history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule traces the changing character of the city and portrays the varied lives and experiences of its inhabitants black and white, rich and poor, slave and free, Christian and Muslim.
She has co-authored a book on the Cape medical profession The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century. A Social History and written The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History, plus a number of articles on the camps.
She edited the post-war letters of President M.T. Steyn and the papers of a 19th-century amateur geologist and scientist, Dr W.G. Atherstone. Currently she is working on the papers of the three white women associated with the black Industrial and Commercial Workers Union [I.C.U.]
Elizabeth’s richly illustrated history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule tells the story of its residents and the city they made – beginning in the seventeenth century with the tiny Dutch settlement, hemmed in by mountains and looking out to sea, and ending with the well-established British colonial city, poised confidently on the threshold of the twentieth century.