Linda Colley has become dame in honors from Queen Elizabeth II announced by the British government this week. The honor entitles her to be known as Dame Linda Colley.
Fellow Princeton University professor David MacMillan of the Department of Chemistry was also honored.
The titles were announced by the queen on Wednesday as part of her annual Birthday Honours lists, in which men and women from various walks of life are named knights and dames or given that government’s highest awards.
Among this year’s other honorees for the queen’s birthday and Platinum Jubilee are author Sir Salman Rushdie, illustrator Sir Quentin Blake, fashion designer Stella McCartney and actor Damian Lewis. MacMillan and Colley were listed as part of the Birthday Honours 2022 Overseas and International List.
Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, was named Dame of the Order of the British Empire for “an outstanding contribution to history … [producing] historical works of profound political and cultural relevance,” including the acclaimed books, “Acts of Union and Disunion” (2014) and “The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World” (2021). She was born in Chester, England, and joined the Princeton faculty in 2003.
She was previously honored by the queen with a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2009.
“I was delighted to get the news, of course, but also delighted that the humanities had been recognized in the list as well as the sciences. History matters,” Colley said. She is currently researching English historian and member of Parliament Edward Gibbon and his six-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-1788) in the context of global history.