Linda Colley

Abstract

Linda Colley graduated from Bristol University with First Class Honours in history in 1972 and completed her PhD at Cambridge University five years later. 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 eighteenth 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.