‘Learning has brought disobedience’: Marginal Literacies and Anti-Colonial Resistance in Early Modern England

I work on the history of English legal thought and legal practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as on law and the British empire. I am currently working, with Professor James Oldham, on volume X of the Oxford History of the Laws of England, covering the period 1760 to 1820.

Background

• Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College (from 2022)

• Professor of Legal History, London School of Economics (from 2013 to 2022)

• Reader in Law and Professor of Legal History, Queen Mary University of London (from 2001 to 2013)

• Reader in Law, Brunel University (from 1997 to 2000)

• Lecturer and Reader, University of Durham (from 1991 to 1997)

• Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford (from 1989 to 1991)

• Junior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand (1988)

• Undergraduate and Postgraduate student, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1981-1987)

Research Interests

• The history of English legal thought and legal practice, 1700-1900

• The legal history of the British Empire

Selected publications

• Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa (CUP 2022)

• (ed.) Jeffrey Gilbert on Property and Contract, Selden Society, volumes 134-135 (Selden Society, 2019)

• (with W. Cornish and others), The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vols. XI-XIII (OUP 2010)

• A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600-1900 (Springer Verlag, 2007)

• White Man's Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (OUP 1996)

• The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760-1850 (OUP 1991)

Other professional memberships and roles

• Secretary, Selden Society

• Member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History

• Member of the editorial board Modern Law Review, Journal of Legal History

Katherine Rundell wins Baillie Gifford Prize

Katherine Rundell, Fellow of All Souls, has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction for

her book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.

Climate Protection, Energy Security, Geopolitics: Squaring the Circle

7th - 8th December 2022, 9:15 am - 2:00 pm

7 December 2022, 9:15am – 5:30pm and 8 December, 9:30am – 2pm, Old Library, All Souls College, University of Oxford, OX1 4AL.

You are invited to join our speakers from different walks of life and regions as they address issues of geopolitics and governance, equity, and justice, and short- versus long-term thinking across climate change from a multidisciplinary point of view.

See and download the conference programme here

Register here (registration required)

Other events this month

Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 1

21st January 2026 5:00pm-6:00pm

Nineteenth-Century Paris: Memories and Counter-MemoriesEsther da Costa Meyer5pm Wednesday 21 JanuaryAuditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford(Free Admission)

The James Ford Lectures 2026, The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life: 1. Foundations

22nd January 2026 5:00pm

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)Location: South School, Examination SchoolsLecture One: Foundations

Dr Lisa Lodwick (1988-2022)

With great sorrow the College announces the death on 3 November of Lisa Lodwick, at the age of 34. She had been suffering from breast cancer.

Lisa studied Archaeology and Anthropology as an undergraduate at Hertford College, and continued to her doctorate at Oxford in 2014. She then had a position at Reading University before being elected to a Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at All Souls in 2017. Lisa’s research concerned the relationship between agriculture and urbanisation in prehistoric and Roman Europe. She was about to take up a University Lecturership in Environmental Archaeology at Cambridge.

Lisa will be greatly missed, and our sympathies go to her husband and family.

An audio recording of the memorial service held for Lisa can be found here.