Patrick Wolfe
Australian historian
Patrick Wolfe (1949 – 18 February 2016) was an English historian and scholar who lived and wrote in Australia.
Born into an Irish Catholic and German Jewish family in Yorkshire, England, his works are credited with establishing the field of settler colonial studies. He also made significant contributions to several academic fields, including anthropology, genocide studies, Indigenous studies, and the historiography of race, colonialism, and imperialism.
Biography
Wolfe was born to an Irish Catholic and German Jewish family in Yorkshire where he received a Jesuit education. In the 1970s he collaborated with Sibnarayan Ray and Greg Dening as an undergraduate. Along with Maurice Bloch, he began his post-graduate studies in social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He then went on to pursue his doctorate with Greg Dening under the supervision of Dipesh Chakrabarty. As a doctoral student he taught Aboriginal history at the University of Melbourne. He was associated with a number of universities in Australia as a teacher and researcher, including Victoria University and La Trobe University. Wolfe held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford among other places.
“Patrick Wolfe” enters the record as australian historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Patrick, Wolfe and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Patrick Wolfe” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Patrick, Wolfe and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109284663. VIAF identifies the subject as 116565018. The Library of Congress control number is n98039450. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patrick Wolfe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.