Princeton professors Linda Colley and Jill Dolan have received the University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, which “recognizes extraordinary faculty distinction in humanities and publication; in teaching and advising; and in humanities-related University service.”

Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History. Her research encompasses British, constitutional, global and imperial history. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2003.

“Put simply, Professor Colley is one of the most eminent living historians, full stop,” wrote one colleague who nominated Colley for the Behrman Award, and “a major force in the history department.”

“Colley is the premier historian of Britain of our time,” wrote another colleague. “[S]he is able to defamiliarize the familiar, showing how now-established ways of thinking took hold and began molding perceptions and actions, especially those of regular people. … In this sense, she is a political historian of the everyday.”

Colley’s many honors include being named a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 by Queen Elizabeth II.

According to Colley’s colleagues, one of whom lauded the “accessible and lyrical quality” of her writing, her books forge brilliant new territory in academia while also appealing to a broad public audience.

One colleague noted that when the history department was conducting a search for an expert on British history, Colley’s seminal work “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837” (1992) — which won the Wolfson Prize for History and put her on the map as a leading expert on nationalism (and unofficial adviser to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair) — was the core text on the undergraduate syllabi of three of the four candidates.

Her 2007 book “The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History,” which one colleague called “a tour de force of what historians call ‘microhistory’ — using individual experiences to illuminate a much larger historical canvas,” was on The New York Times’ list of the 10 best books of that year. Her 2014 book “Acts of Union and Disunion” originated as a series of 15 talks she gave on BBC Radio 4. Colley has guest-curated an exhibition at the British Library in London and delivered the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street, among many other public lectures around the world.

“If there were a Nobel Prize in history, Colley would be my nominee,” wrote Jill Lepore of Harvard University in her New Yorker review of Colley’s “The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen” (2021), which unspools constitutional history in the context of global history and war.

At Princeton, Colley’s lecture courses on British imperial history from 1600 to 2000 regularly draw hundreds of undergraduates. Drawing on her deep connections with the departments of English and art and archaeology, and strong relationships with scholars around the world, she devised a perennially popular graduate seminar focused on new research into the 18th through early 20th centuries, which brings experts in the history, literature and art of the period to campus.

Born in Britain, Colley earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University.