Dr Lisa Ford

Research Summary

Dr Ford's research centres on ideas and practices of order in the post-1763 British Empire and the early national United States.

Her prize-winning first book, Settler Sovereignty, explains how and why North American and Australasian settler polities defined their sovereignty against indigenous customary law after 1800.

Dr Ford is currently working on two ARC Discovery Projects on the legal history of the British Empire: Convicts, Empire and Order (2011-2013), and Protecting the Peace (2012-2015). The first is a comparative study of legal dilemmas arising in sites of convict transportation - including new discourses of British subjecthood and pervasive conflict about the division between civil and military power. The second study investigates challenges posed to the local administration of justice and the imperial constitution by protectors of slaves and Aborigines after 1824.

Dr Ford is also working with the Francis Forbes Society and AUSTLII on two major projects centered on the recovery and publication of Australasian legal history sources.

She received the 2012 Max Crawford Award, recognising 'outstanding achievement in the humanities by young Australian scholars... whose publications contribute towards an understanding of their discipline by the general public.'

Teaching

2010-11: Australia: Protest & Memory
2009-11: Introduction to History: The Big Picture (World History)
2009: Winners & Losers: Welfare & Poverty in Australian History

Publications

BOOKS:
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press: 2010) (2008 Thomas J. Wilson Prize; 2010 Littleton-Griswold Prize, 2010, NSW Premier’s History Award).

EDITED BOOKS:
Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

Brent Salter, Bruce Kercher and Lisa Ford, The Kercher Reports: Decisions of the Superior Courts, 1828 to 1845 (Federation Press and The Francis Forbes Society, forthcoming).

ARTICLES, CHAPTERS AND FEATURE REVIEWS:
Lisa Ford and David Roberts, “Expansion, 1820-1850,” in Bashford and McIntyre (eds) Cambridge History of Australia (Cambridge, forthcoming 2013).

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, forthcoming 2013).

Lisa Ford, “Locating Indigenous Self-Determination in the Margins of Settler Sovereignty: An Introduction,” Ford and Rowse (eds) Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 1-11.

Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford, "Settler Sovereignty and the Shapeshifting Crown," Ford and Rowse (eds) Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 23-34.

Lisa Ford “Thinking Big about New South Wales History: Colonial Law in Global Perspective,” Australian Bar Review 34 (2011): 204-213.

Lisa Ford, “Feature Review: James Belich, Replenishing the Earth,” American Historical Review 115.4 (2010): 1106-8.

Lisa Ford, “The Pig and the Peace,” eds Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 169-186.

Lisa Ford, “Before Settler Sovereignty and after Aboriginal Sovereignty,” ed. Bain Attwood and Tom Griffiths, Frontier, Race, Nation: Henry Reynolds and Australian History (Australian Scholarly Press, 2009), 185-208.

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, “Yellow(s) (Im)Peril(ed): Reinventing the Colonial Nightmare,” Australian Studies 18.1 (2003): 67-114.

Lisa Ford, “Heroes, Villains and Wicked Priests: Authority and Story in the Histories of Simon Schama” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 29.1 (1999): 23-46