Princeton Professor Linda Colley gives insights into her work at the Gotha Research Centre

How does a scientific work actually come into being? How do authors arrive at their working hypothesis, how do they organise the material? How do they experience the reception of their theses in the academic world and in the feuilletons? The historian Linda Colley, professor at Princeton University, will talk at the Gotha Research Centre about the work on her book The Gun, the Ship and the Pen. Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World, which was named "Best Book of the Year" by the Financial Times 2021.

In it, Colley, who has also taught at Yale and the London School of Economics, explores the relationship between warfare and constitution-making in the modern era from a global-historical perspective. Colley has already published several successful, widely reviewed historical works, for example on the emergence of "Britishness". Her book about the globetrotter Elisabeth Marsh, who led a remarkably free life as a woman in the 18th century, is in the New York Times Book Review's list of "Best Non-Fiction Books Through Time" and has also been translated into German.