Dame Linda Jane Colley, (born 13 September 1949 in Chester, England) is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She previously held chairs at Yale University and at the London School of Economics. Her work frequently approaches the past from inter-disciplinary perspectives. Colley is married to fellow historian Sir David Cannadine. Early life and education Linda Colley took her first degree in history at Bristol University before completing a doctorate on the Tory Party in the eighteenth century at the University of Cambridge, supervised by John H. Plumb. She subsequently held a Research Fellowship at Girton College, a joint lectureship in history at Newnham and King's Colleges, and in 1979 was appointed the first woman Fellow at Christ's College, where she is now an Honorary Fellow. Career Colley's first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), challenged the then dominant view by arguing that the Tory Party remained active and influential during its years out of power, exploring the consequences of this for the evolution of ideas, popular politics and political action in eighteenth century England and Wales. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson History Prize and has passed through five editions, investigated how – and how far – inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It has attracted wide and continuing interest both as a study of the evolution, complexities and fractures of British national identities, and as a contribution to understandings of nationalism more broadly. In March 1993, Colley gave a half-hour Opinions lecture televised on Channel 4 and subsequently published in The Times as "Britain must move with the times to be great again". In 1998, Colley accepted a Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics. She spent the next five years researching the experiences of thousands of Britons taken captive in North America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1600 and 1850. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002), the result of this work, used captivity narratives of different kinds to investigate the under-belly and sporadic vulnerability of this empire and its makers. She