The E.W. Cole Lecture: Who Gets to Write History?

Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She grew up in western Victoria and completed Honours degrees in Arts and Science at the University of Melbourne, and a doctorate in History at the University of Oxford. Having worked at the University of Sheffield, and Royal Holloway, University of London, Zoë returned to Melbourne in 2018. A historian of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, she has published widely on British imperial networks and governance, settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession and humanitarian activism. Cambridge University Press published her most recent book, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830-1870. Her current research, supported by the Australian Research Council, focuses particularly on the legacies of British slavery in Australia and on settler colonialism in Victoria.