Linda Colley
   Leverhulme Research Professor and
     School Professor in History
     The London School of Economics and Political Science
 

Writing War, Writing Empire
   in the Eighteenth Century

            "The Sword and the Pen"
                 Tuesday, 17 April at 11:00 a.m.
                    Rose Hills Theatre, Smith Campus Center

            "Writing and Winning"
                    Thursday, 19 April at 11:00 a.m.
                    Rose Hills Theatre, Smith Campus Center
 

Professor Colley will have several more engagements with the Pomona College student, faculty and alumni communities.
 
 

The Thompson Lecturer for 2000/2001:

LINDA COLLEY is at once one of the most respected British historians today and an exciting innovator in the historian's craft.  Best known for her seminal and best-selling, Britons: Forging a Nation 1707-1837, she has engaged issues of the past which inform the present.  In analyzing the formation of "Britishness" during the critical Eighteenth Century, Professor Colley necessarily expanded the conversation over nation-ness from political and ideological narrative to war, peace, dominance, majesty, woman and man-power, and the economy.  In doing so, she developed "a healthier, more comprehensive, more dynamic view of the past" and of the ways that history has converged as well as diverged, winning the Wolfson Prize as well as the accolades of professional colleagues and the reading public.  Britons, however, is only one of her three books and twenty-five published essays and articles.

Earning a B.A. from Bristol University with First Class Honours in History, Linda Colley pursued graduate studies at Cambridge University.  After receiving her Ph.D. in History, she taught for several years at Cambridge before moving to Yale University in 1982.  In 1992, Professor Colley was named Richard M. Colgate Professor of History at Yale -- an appointment from which she moved in 1998.  She consistently attracted a large student following at Yale, due primarily to her wit, wisdom, and sensitive historical perspective.  Presently, Leverhulme Research Professor and School Professor in History at the London School of Economics, Linda Colley writes, lectures, and teaches the scholarly and student world from London.

Linda Colley has a reputation for insight and historical perspective -- something which has gained her invitations to speak at some eighteen of the most prestigious lectureships in the world.  It has recently prompted the British Prime Minister to call on her to deliver the Millenium Lecture in 1999, "Britishness in the 21st Century".  Now on the cusp of publishing a major new book on European empires in the Eighteenth Century, it is altogether fitting that Pomona College History Department elected her the first Ena H. Thompson Lecturer of the new millennium.