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Guggenheim Fellow Q&A: Professor Linda Colley, British historian

Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, is one of the recipients of the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Colley received the award in the field of Constitutional Study, and she is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. The Daily Princetonian sat down with Colley to discuss her current research on British history and its applications to society. This Q&A is part of a series featuring the four University affiliates who are recipients of this year's Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Daily Princetonian: You are known for an impressive collection of writings on Britain from 1700 onwards. What inspired you to study this time period? Has there been a particularly rewarding aspect of working in this field, and perhaps any drawbacks?

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Professor Linda Colley: Like most scholars, my intellectual interests have actually changed over time. I started as a historian of 18th century England. I first came to the United States in 1982 when I worked at Yale [University], and adapting to a U.S. environment and teaching British history as a foreign subject changed my own ways of relating to it. And I suppose I began to expand outwards. I became interested in U.S. history because obviously there are close links between 17th and 18th century England and Britain and what’s happening this side of the pond. And I became — partly because I was then in Yale in New Haven, which has the wonderful British Art Center, and that made me very intrigued by the visual side of cultures. And the book that I wrote at Yale, which became "Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837," incorporates — and this was the first time I had done it — visual evidence as well as textual and manuscript sources. Since then I’ve changed again. I have looked also at imperial histories. My penultimate book, "The Ordeal of Elizabeth: A Woman in World History," was precisely that. It took a woman whose ethnic background was unclear and who became a traveller but also someone who came close to enslavement in the 18th century. [She] travelled in North Africa, had connections with America and Britain, then went to India and travelled there. And I used her very tormented and extraordinary trajectories and movements not just to explore a hitherto unknown life, but to explore global movements more broadly in the middle of the 18th century . . . My last book was based on a series of lectures I gave for BBC Radio 4 in the U.K. And then the project that I’m working on now is, again, very much global history but exploring global history through the genesis and spread of written constitutions. I’m trying to resurrect the field of constitutional history — which has rather died a death these past few decades — and meld it with global history and really to look at these extraordinary texts in a rather more, I hope, creative and imaginative way.

DP: Could you talk a little more about what are you working on right now? What are you particularly excited about pursuing?

LC: I’m really focusing on this study of words and war really because what I want to do more specifically is trace how growing and sharper levels of conflict in different continents from the middle decades of the 18th cdentury is connected in all sorts of ways with the evolution and spread of new kinds of written constitutions. People tend, I think, often to think of written constitutions as being to do with democracy, careful discussion in closed rooms among thoughtful people. But in fact, the connection between the sword and the pen, wars, and words is very, very close. And that’s what I want to look at.

DP: What compelled you to write “The Sword and the Pen: Conflict and the Making of Constitutions,” which you won the Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue?

LC: Well, that’s the book that I’m working on, that’s what they gave me the fellowship for. And I have a year’s leave next year which I’m spending at the Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala in Sweden, and I’d already got that. So I’ve got this prospect of a year’s academic leave. And the Guggenheim is a very nice extra bonus, and I hope that with this leave next academic year I will be able to come pretty close to completing the book. That’s the idea, anyway.

DP: How has your background influenced your work? In other words, do you think your work has responded to your location? Has being overseas at Princeton impacted how you approach your study of British culture and history?

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LC: I think it must have affected me in a great many ways, some of which I’m conscious of, some of which I’m probably not conscious of. Certainly I don’t think I would have moved so adventurously and in the directions I have done in terms of intellectual projects had I stayed in Britain. I think probably I would have just have continued to do British history, whereas moving to the United States has obliged me and encouraged me to diversify. And it’s been a great joy meeting, both at Yale and here, colleagues and specialists in so many different disciplines and focusing on different countries and continents. Because global history, for example, is a very big thing in the Princeton History Department, and I have several colleagues who are avid exponents of it. And I’ve learned a great deal talking to them. But also, I think, if you move around, you become more closely interested in issues of identity because you are aware that your own identity is coming under pressure and changing. You are forced, obliged, encouraged to come to terms with people from radically different backgrounds who have different sets of ideas. And it’s just very interesting constantly being made to reassess the assumptions that you were trained up in as a child and as a young person. And I don’t think it’s accidental that a lot of my work has been about individuals in the past who have either chosen or have been obliged to cross boundaries in different ways. There’s obviously some autobiographical element to that.

DP: Do you see a connection between your work on the past, namely of constitutions, and our future as a society?

LC: Yes, I think there are connections . . . my curiosity about these texts was initially an intellectual curiosity. I feel that written constitutions are a form of literature. They’re not just legal documents; they are texts. I don’t feel that they’ve been exploited in as diverse ways as they can be and they should be. But I am curious whether the close connection, in all sorts of ways, in the past between conflict and the making of constitutions — what does that say and what does that imply about the continuing validity and use of these kind of devices now and in the future? You could argue, for example, in the United States, that one of the many challenges this huge country faces is that its written constitution was put together in the wake of a massive war of independence, which was also a global war. It was made very difficult to amend, it is now the oldest constitution of this form in existence, and in many ways it is out of date. There’s things in it which don’t make much sense anymore. There’s things which should go in constitutions, and which are put in constitutions now, which obviously it doesn’t contain, because it was hammered out in 1787. So given that most countries need some kind of trauma to make them undertake a constitution or to radically revise a constitution, what does this say for the future of the United States and this text which has great iconic importance, but in some ways, lots of ways, just doesn’t work all that well, arguably, anymore?

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