Rate My Professor Zoe Laidlaw

Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne, a position she assumed upon her return to Australia in September 2018. She holds the title of Professor of the History of Britain’s Empire. Prior to this, Laidlaw spent over twenty years in the United Kingdom, serving at the University of Sheffield from 2001 to 2005, where she contributed to the establishment of the International History programme and taught courses on the history of Britain’s empire, and subsequently at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2005 to 2018. Her academic journey began at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a combined BA(Hons)/BSc(Hons) in History and Mathematics between 1991 and 1996, achieving first-class honours in Mathematics before undertaking her History honours thesis on British treatment of Indigenous peoples across the empire in the 1830s, supervised by David Philips. She earned her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in 2001.

Laidlaw specialises in nineteenth-century British imperialism and colonialism, with research interests encompassing imperial networks and governance, humanitarian activism, settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and the legacies of slavery in Australia. Her key publications include the monograph Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester University Press, 2005), which examines interpersonal communications in Colonial Office records; Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a study of Quaker activist Thomas Hodgkin and the Aborigines’ Protection Society; and co-edited volume Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Inter-connected World with Alan Lester (Routledge, 2015). Additional works feature Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne (University of Melbourne, 2023) and articles such as 'Peopling the Country by Unpeopling the Natives' (2023). As Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council Discovery Projects 'Inquiring into Empire' and 'Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery', she analyses imperial inquiries and the impact of slave-derived wealth on colonial Australia. Laidlaw’s scholarship highlights the roles of overlooked groups like women, Indigenous peoples, and slaves in shaping imperial histories.