Zoe Laidlaw, Chief Investigator

Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. 
She grew up on Gunditjmara Country in western Victoria and was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. After spending over 20 years studying and working in the UK, Zoë returned to Australia in 2018. A historian of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, she has published on British imperial networks and governance, settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and humanitarian activism. Much of her research now focuses on the Port Phillip District/Victoria, both within the Australian Legacies of Slavery projects and beyond. Zoë’s books include 
Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Colonial Connections 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester UP, 2005), and co-edited with Alan Lester, Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Inter-connected World (Routledge, 2015).