This year’s volume of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, the Society’s academic journal, is now available from Cambridge University Press.
The volume (Seventh Series, Volume 2) was published online on 6 December and is available to read Open Access online. The print edition of Transactions will be posted to Fellows and Members of the Society, who choose to receive hard copies, in January.* The volume opens with a Welcome by the editor, Jan Machielsen.
The 2024 volume contains fourteen Research Articles. These have been organised roughly chronologically, stretching from Krisztina Ilko’s study of the presence of non-elite Christian women in 14th-century China, to James Baker’s survey of the impact of computerisation for museology and museum working practices in the 1960s-80s.
Other articles demonstrate our field’s geographic and thematic diversity, ranging from late imperial Russia (Sarah Badcock) via early modern Wales (Sarah Ward Clavier) to 1930s India (Abhimanyu Arni), and from the history of sport (Ollie Randall) to that of internationalism (Su Lin Lewis).
We are also very pleased to publish eight contributions to the journal’s Common Room. As part of CUP’s transition of the journal to full Open Access, submissions to the Common Room accepted after January 2024 are labelled or introduced as Comments or Brief Comments (rather than ‘common room’).
This year’s discussions within the Common Room include John Sanders’ reflections on his experience as a ‘latecomer historian’, David Stack on the intersection of wellbeing and history teaching, and early career work in Black British history, from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, by Kristy Warren, Annabelle Gilmore and Montaz Marché.
Submitting an article to Transactions
The journal’s editor and editorial board welcome submission of research articles and commentaries for review. Transactions publishes new research on a wide range of historical subject areas, chronologies and geographies, and invites comment and opinion essays on approaches to historical study, within and beyond higher education.
We welcome submissions from historians at all career stages of academia and those working historically in related sectors, such as museums, heritage, archives and public history.
Since August 2024, all articles accepted for publication are published Open Access, with no charge to the author. and therefore accessible to the widest possible readership. TRHS editors offer a prompt, efficient and friendly review process, with all accepted content appearing initially online, via CUP’s FirstView, and then in annual online and print volumes.
For more on the Transactions, and how to submit an article for consideration, please see here. Articles for review may be submitted here to the editor and editorial board.
*This year’s posting of the print edition of Transactions is delayed by 4-6 weeks following a significant cyber attack experienced by our publisher, Cambridge University Press, in 2024, which affected all journal publishing.
The Society is very grateful to CUP who have worked very hard and efficiently to restore their systems, with the final phase of this recovery being the despatch of journal print copies.
The cover image for the 2024 volume of Transactions is ‘Angels transporting St Catherine’s body’, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409, Tempera, gold, and ink on vellum, 23.8 × 17 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 54.1.1a, b, fo. 20r. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access.). This image is further discussed in Krisztina Ilko’s article ‘Yangzhou, 1342: Caterina Vilioni’s Passport to the Afterlife’.