About Linda Colley

Linda Colley’s books include In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), Namier (1982)., Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002) and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007), which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. Her third book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992) won the Wolfson History Prize. Her work has been translated into ten languages.

Her most recent book was the highly-acclaimed Acts of Union and Disunion, which was based on a 15-part BBC Radio 4 series broadcast in January 2014 ahead of the Scottish Independence Referendum and which examines out what has held the United Kingdom together – and what might drive it apart.

Linda Colley was born in 1949 in Chester, England, and took her first degree at Bristol University, before completing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge. She subsequently held Fellowships at Girton and Christ’s Colleges, and also a joint-lectureship in history at Newnham and King’s Colleges.

In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academia Europaea. She holds Honorary degrees from the Universities of Essex, East Anglia, Bristol, Hull and Southbank University.

In 1999 she delivered the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street on ‘Britishness of the 21st Century’. Among other scholarly and public lectures, she has delivered the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University (1997), the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast (1997), a James Ford Special Lecture and the Bateman Lectures at Oxford (1998 and 2003), the Nehru Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics (2003), the Lewis Walpole Memorial Lecture at Yale (2000), the Carnochan Lecture at Stanford (1998) and the President’s Lecture at Princeton University in 2007. As well as The Annual ISEHR Lecture, University of Delhi, 2011; the Jon Sigurossen Memorial Lecture, University of Iceland, 2012 and the Margaret Macmillan Lecture in International History, University of Toronto, 2013. Future scheduled academic lectures in 2015 include the Aylmer Lecture at the University of York, and the Robbs Lectures, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

UCD College of Arts and Humanities Annual College Lecture

At the very heart of the academic calendar, the Annual College Lecture Series brings together scholars, writers and members of the creative community. The inaugural lecture, hosted by UCD School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore in 2017, was delivered by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, Paul Muldoon.

‘The Drowned Blackbird: An Introduction to 18th Century Ulster Poetry’