Lisa Ford
Lisa Ford
Endowed Professor of Modern British Imperial History
A graduate of Columbia University in New York, Professor Ford is a legal historian whose work centres on ideas and practices of order in the post-1763 British Empire and the early national United States. She is the prize-winning author of three monographs: Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Harvard UP, 2010); Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard UP, 2016), co-authored with Professor Lauren Benton; The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard UP, 2021); and Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819-1833 (Cambridge, 2025), co-authored with Professor Kirsten McKenzie, Dr Naomi Parkinson and Professor David Andrew Roberts. Professor Ford has also co-edited two books: with Tim Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge 2013); and with Peter Cane and Mark McMillan, The Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge UP, 2022).
Dalton Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Foreign Relations Law, American Society for International Law (The King’s Peace)
Australian Academy of the Humanities Fellow, 2021-
Australian Academy of the Humanities Fellow, 2021-
Future Fellow, Australian Research Council, 2019-2024
Discovery Early Career Academic Fellow, Australian Research Council, 2012-2015
Crawford Medal for outstanding contribution to the humanities by an early career scholar
Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society, American Historical Association (Settler Sovereignty)
NSW Premier’s Prize for best general history book (Settler Sovereignty)
NSW Premier’s Prize for best general history book (Settler Sovereignty)
Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard UP) for the best first book in any field published by Harvard University Press in 2008 (Settler Sovereignty)
Bancroft Dissertation Prize for the best American Studies Dissertation submitted at Columbia University in 2007 (Settler Sovereignty)
Legal History of the British Empire, 1760-1840
Legal History of the Early National United States
Settler Colonialism
HIST 1011 World History from 1500 to Present
HIST 3137 The British Empire
Monographs
Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson and David Roberts, Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions of Inquiry and the Remaking of the British World, 1819-1835 (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson and David Roberts, Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions of Inquiry and the Remaking of the British World, 1819-1835 (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Lisa Ford, The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard UP, 2021). (Winner: Dalton Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Foreign Relations Law, American Society for International Law; Shortlisted: Kenshur Prize (Indiana) & Transatlantic Studies Association CUP Prize; Feature Reviewed in American Historical Review in December 2023.)
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard UP, 2016)
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Harvard UP, 2010). (Winner: Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard UP); Littleton-Griswold Prize (AHA); New South Wales Premier’s History Prize (General History))
Edited Books
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Harvard UP, 2010). (Winner: Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard UP); Littleton-Griswold Prize (AHA); New South Wales Premier’s History Prize (General History))
Edited Books
Peter Cane, Mark McMillan and Lisa Ford, Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge, 2013)
Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge, 2013)
Journal Articles
Kirsten McKenzie and Lisa Ford, ‘A Dance of Crown and Parliament: Empire and Reform in the Age of Liverpool,’ English Historical Review 137.589 (2023), 1606-1632.
Lisa Ford, “Sovereignty and the Problem of Order in Belize, 1763-1821,” RWI Forum Historiae Iuris 12 December 2022.
Naomi Parkinson (lead) et al, “A Commissioner’s Day: Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Evidence in Royal Commissions of Inquiry,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37.1 (2022), 185-201.
Lisa Ford and Naomi Parkinson, “Legislating Liberty: Liberated Africans and the Abolition Acts, 1806-1824,” Slavery & Abolition 42.4 (2021), 827-846.
Stephen Doherty (lead) et al, “Inquiring into the Corpus of Empire,” Special Issue: Journal of World History 33.2 (2021), 219-40.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49 (2020), 1-21.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, “Island Despotism: Trinidad, the British Imperial Constitution, and Global Legal Order,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46 (2018), 21-46.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “‘Mr Peel’s Amendments’: Imperial criminal reform in a distant penal colony” Legal History Journal, 27.2 (2016), 198-214.
Katharine Booth and Lisa Ford, “Ross v Chambers: Assimilation Law and Policy in the Northern Territory,” Aboriginal History, 40 (2016), 3-25.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “Legal change, convict activism and the reform of penal relocation in colonial New South Wales: The Port Macquarie penal settlement, 1822-1826,” Australian Historical Studies 46.2 (2015), 174-190.
Sean Brawley et al, “History on Trial: Evaluating Learning Outcomes through Audit and Accreditation in a National Standards Environment,” Teaching and Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal, 3.2 (2015), 89-105.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “New South Wales penal settlements and the transformation of secondary punishment in the nineteenth-century British Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15.3 (2014)
Lisa Ford, “Antislavery and the Reconstitution of Empire,” Australian Historical Studies 45.1 (2014), 71-86.
Sean Brawley et al, 'Learning outcomes assessment and History: TEQSA, the After Standards Project and the QA/QI challenge in Australia', Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 12, no. 1 (2013), 20 – 35
Sean Brawley et al, 'Learning outcomes assessment and History: TEQSA, the After Standards Project and the QA/QI challenge in Australia', Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 12, no. 1 (2013), 20 – 35
Sean Brawley et al, “Applying Standards to Tertiary-Level History: Policy Challenges and the After Standards Project,” History Australia 8.3 (2011), 177-194.
Lisa Ford and Brent Salter “From Pluralism to Territorial Sovereignty: The 1816 Trial of Mow-watty in the Superior Court of New South Wales,” Indigenous Law Journal (Toronto) 7.1 (2008), 67-86.
Lisa Ford, “Indigenous Policy and its Historical Occlusions: the North American and Global Contexts of Australian Settlement,” Australian Indigenous Law Review 12 (2008), 69-80.
Lisa Ford, “Empire and Order on the Colonial Frontiers of Georgia and New South Wales,” Itinerario: Geographies of Empire 3 (2006), 95-113.
Lisa Ford, “Heroes, Villains and Wicked Priests: Authority and Story in the histories of Simon Schama,” Clio 29 (1999), 23-46.
Book Chapters
Lisa Ford and Lauren Benton, “Empire, nation and the international in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic,” in Richard Devetak and Tim Dunne, The Rise of the International (Oxford UP, 2024), chapter 9.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “Dispossession” in eds. Peter Cain, Lisa Ford and Mark McMillan, The Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge UP, 2022), 305-217.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, ‘Empire and the Rule of Law,’ Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law, in Jens Meierhenrich and Martin Loughlin (eds) (Cambridge UP, 2021), 101-117.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, “Legal Panics Fast and Slow: Slavery and the Constitution of Empire Time and Imperial Justice,” in eds. Daniel Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago UP, 2020), 295-316.
Lisa Ford, “Protecting the Peace on the Edges of Empire: Commissioners of Crown Lands in New South Wales,” in Bain Attwood, Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow (eds), Protection and Empire (Cambridge UP, 2017), 175-193.
Lisa Ford, “Law” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford (eds), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Palgrave, 2014), 216-236.
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “Expansion, 1820-1850,” in Bashford and McIntyre (eds) Cambridge History of Australia (Cambridge UP, 2013), 121-148.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, “Magistrates in Empire: Convicts, Slaves, and the Remaking of the Plural Legal Order in the British Empire,” in Benton and Ross (ed), Legal Pluralism and Empires (NYU Press, 2013), 173-199.
Lisa Ford, “Locating Indigenous Self-Determination in the Margins of Settler Sovereignty: An Introduction,” Ford & Rowse eds, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge, 2013) 1-11.
Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford, “Settler Sovereignty and the Shapeshifting Crown,” Ford & Rowse (eds) Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge, 2013), 23-34.
Lisa Ford, “The Pig and the Peace,” Dorsett and Hunter eds, Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave, 2010).
Lisa Ford, “Before Settler Sovereignty and after Aboriginal Sovereignty,” ed. Bain Attwood and Tom Griffiths, Race, Nation: Henry Reynolds and Australian History (Australian Scholarly Press, 2019).
Columbia University (MA, MPhil, PhD)
University of Queensland (BA, LLB, MA)