“Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.”

British academic and historian

Linda Colley is a British academic and historian of British, imperial, and global history from 1700. She is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, and has also held professorships at Yale University and the London School of Economics. Her work often uses interdisciplinary methods to examine the making of Britain and its place in wider imperial and global contexts. She is known for scholarship that connects political, cultural, and historical questions across long spans of modern history.