This workshop is on entirely new work for me, a biography of an unknown Dutch woman called Marguerite Wolters who headed a Europe-wide spy agency for nearly twenty years (1771–1790). She sold her intelligence exclusively to the British government, who used it to consolidate its rising superpower position in the world, especially in the aftermath of the disastrous American Revolution. I am still in the research phase of this project. In the talk I’ll speak about some of its key challenges. These include language difficulties, handwriting difficulties, and sheer volume – there are more than 10,000 pages of her intelligence in Britain’s National Archives. I’ll speak about the mixed blessings of Generative AI in solving these issues. The biggest problem, however, is in getting to know a subject who by definition did not want to be known. Biographies of spies amplify issues common to much historical biography. 

Kate Fullagar FAHA is a Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University, and currently Vice President of the Australian Historical Association. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023).