Professor Lisa Ford

Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Her major publications include the multiple prize-winning Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Harvard, 2010); The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard, 2021); and Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (co-authored with Lauren Benton, Harvard, 2016). Ford has edited Settler Colonial Studies; and co-edited Australian Historical Studies, the Cambridge Studies in Legal History Series, and the Cambridge Legal History of Australia (2022). Her work has been funded by a series of grants from the Australian Research Council in Australia.

Project at IAS

Lisa Ford worked on an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project called Empire of Emergency. This project explores how emergency legislation and declarations of martial law spread across the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process, she interrogates the relationship of law and violence in imperial history.