author
Julia Keese Colles
1840–1913
A 19th-century American historian, lecturer, and writer, she is best remembered for preserving the literary and local history of Morristown, New Jersey. Her work brings together a scholar’s curiosity and a strong sense of place.
1 Audiobook
Authors and Writers Associated with Morristown With a Chapter on Historic Morristown
by Julia Keese Colles
About the author
Born in 1840, Julia Keese Nelson Colles was an American historian, lecturer, and writer whose life and work were closely tied to Morristown, New Jersey. She studied at the Abbott Collegiate Institute in New York City and later held the chair of Social Science at Rutgers Female College in New York.
Colles wrote and lectured on literature, history, and culture, with interests that ranged from German and British literature to American and European subjects. She is especially known for Authors and Writers Associated with Morristown (1893), a book that helped document the town’s literary connections and historic character.
She was also connected with historical work in New Jersey beyond her books and lectures, including participation in the New Jersey Historical Society. Colles died in 1913, and her surviving papers suggest a wide-ranging intellectual life shaped by teaching, public speaking, and local history.