Linda Colley was born at Chester in northwest England.  After graduating with First Class Honors in History from Bristol University, she went on to a PhD at Cambridge University, where she became the first female Fellow of Christ’s College.  She worked at Yale University from 1982 to 1998, at the London School of Economics as Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship from 1998 to 2003, and at Princeton University as Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History after 2003.

Linda’s first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), rejected current orthodoxy by arguing that the Tory party was both popular and influential under the first two Hanoverians.  She followed this up with a book-length study of the life and work of Sir Lewis Namier (1989), an historian whose legacy she had challenged through her previous research.

Linda’s highly praised third book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), awarded the Wolfson Prize for History, was the first detailed historical analysis of how the English, Scots, and Welsh became British.  Few recent works have had such an impact on the field of British history, and Britons remains a standard text for scholars examining the creation of national identities around the world.

Linda’s own research widened to a global scale after Britons.  Her book Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (2002), wove together narratives of Britons held in captivity in North America, South Asia and North Africa.  In The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007), named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Linda explored global history through the experiences of a British woman traveling in the Americas, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific.  Her latest book, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021), adopts a breathtakingly broad comparative perspective on world history, connecting war with the shaping of constitutions around the globe.

Linda continued to engage with British constitutional issues.  She curated a British Library exhibition on constitutional liberties in 2008-9.  Just before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, she made a series of BBC Radio lectures on the creation of the United Kingdom, published as Acts of Union and Disunion.  In addition, she has delivered the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge, the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast, the Ford and Bateman Lectures at Oxford, the Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland, NZ, and many other notable public lectures throughout the world.

Linda was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999, and of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004.  She became a Commander of the British Empire in 2009.  To many of those who will attend this conference, however, she remains above all the admired doctoral advisor who guided them with skill, insight, and great care through the difficult process of writing a dissertation and entering the academic profession.