Linda Colley

Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes in Early Modern and Modern History, SCAS.
Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University

Linda Colley holds a BA in History from Bristol University and earned her MA and Ph.D. at the
University of Cambridge. She taught at the latter institution until 1981 and then moved to Yale
University, where she became a university professor. From 1997 to 2003, she was a research
professor at the London School of Economics, moving to her present position in 2003. She is
a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the Aca-
demia Europaea. In 2009 she was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire,
and in 2022 she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire for her services to history.
She holds eight honorary degrees.

Colley’s books include In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (1982); Namier
(1989); Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson History Prize;
Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (2002); The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A
Woman in World History (2007), listed by the New York Times as one of the best ten books of the
year; and Acts of Union and Disunion (2014), which was based on fifteen lectures delivered on
BBC Radio 4 in advance of the Scottish independence referendum and the EU/BREXIT referendum.
 Her most recent  book, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of
the Modern World, on which she worked during a fellowship at SCAS, was published in spring 2021.
Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Colley has organized major exhibitions at the British Library in London. Previously, she has been a
member of the Research Board of the British Museum, the Research Committee of the New York
Public Library, the Board of the British Library and the Board of the Princeton University Press. She
occasionally writes for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and the Financial
Times. Among other awards, she has held a five-year Leverhulme Professorial Research Fellowship, a
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a Fellowship at SCAS itself. In 2021-22, she was
a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.