Princeton University History Department

Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, is an expert on Britain since 1700. She favors cross-disciplinary history, and in both her writing and her teaching examines Britain’s past in a broader European, imperial, and global context. Born in Britain, she graduated from Bristol University with First Class Honors in history (1972) and completed her Ph.D. in history at Cambridge University (1977). The first female Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, she moved to Yale University in 1982. Her first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), challenged the dominant view by arguing that the Tory party remained active and potent during their years out of power. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, shows how the inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th century. In 1998 Professor Colley left Yale to accept a Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics. Supported by the award, she spent the next five years researching the experiences of the thousands of Britons who were taken captive in North America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1600 and 1850 as the British Empire expanded. Captives (2002), the result of this research, uses captivity narratives to investigate the vulnerability of the empire, the complex relations between the imperialists and the societies they sought to invade, and the flexibility of individual identity. She is also the author of Namier (1989), a reappraisal of the Polish-born historian Lewis Namier. Professor Colley writes for British and American periodicals and newspapers, including the Guardian, the Times, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. In 1999 she delivered the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street. Among other public lectures, she has delivered the Treveleyan Lectures at Cambridge University (1997), the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast (1997), the Ford and Bateman Lectures at Oxford (1999 and 2003), the Nehru Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics (2003), the Lewis Walpole Memorial Lecture at Yale (2000), and the Carnochan Lecture at Stanford (1998). In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Colley joined the Princeton History Department in 2003.

Professor Colley’s current book project, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: The World in a Life, traces an 18th-century woman’s life progress from the Caribbean, to Britain, to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and on to India, as a way of exploring growing connections and collisions between continents and cultures. A future project will study the dynamics of nationalism in the 1860s, including the unification of Italy and Germany and the American Civil War.

Since arriving at Princeton Professor Colley has taught survey courses on British history, a seminar on travel and travel narratives, and a graduate seminar that considers 18th- and 19th-century British history from a transnational perspective. In the future she plans to teach a seminar comparing British and American forms of empire.

• M. A. and Ph.D., Cambridge University