The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the recommencement of its annual International Fellows Lecture. The 2026 lecture will be given by Professor Amy Froide (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) and take place, online, at 4pm GMT on Friday 4 December.
Amy’s lecture — entitled ‘The Charitable Corporation Scandal of 1732 and the Female Shareholders who stood up to Financial Fraud’ — is co-hosted this year with the Economic History Society to mark its centenary year.
Amy’s lecture will explore the activist female shareholders of one eighteenth-century company, the Charitable Corporation, to illuminate women’s role in Britain’s financial history. Booking is now available and all are welcome to attend.
The International Fellows Lecture is an opportunity to learn more about the research of RHS Fellows resident outside the UK. The lecture will form part of the Society’s existing annual programme of public lectures which are currently given, in-person and online, by UK-based Fellows.
Amy Froide is Professor of History and Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is a historian of women and the economy of early modern Britain.
Amy’s publications include Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 (OUP, 2016) and Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (OUP, 2005). She is currently working on a book on the Charitable Corporation and a project on separated wives in early modern England.
The restoration of the International Fellows Lecture follows the introduction, this summer, of a new funding programme — of International Research Grants — which supports research by historians resident outside the UK who seek access to archives in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Ten awards were made in the first year of this new scheme which the Society expects to run again in 2027.
The Society is an international community of historians, at all career stages, and we hope these new initiatives — as well as the existing opportunities for all Fellows and Members — provide additional support and audiences for RHS Fellows and Members worldwide.
In addition to Amy’s lecture on 4 December, other Fellows Lectures in 2026 include:
- Charles West (Edinburgh) on ‘‘‘Alike in Appearance but not in Scope”: Queens and the Making of Medieval Europe’ (February)
- Sasha Handley (Manchester) on ‘‘The Haunting at the Rectory: Ghost Stories and Women’s Lives in Early Modern England’ (May)
- Rebecca Earle (Warwick) on ‘The Last Voyage of the Santiago: A Ship and its World in the Age of Revolution’ (July)
- Glen O’Hara (Oxford Brookes) on ‘In All Our Footsteps: Rights of Way and Access to the Land in England and Wales since 1949′ (Friday 25 September, and now open for booking)
- Hanna Diamond (Cardiff) on ‘From Cabaret Star to Gaullist Spy: Josephine Baker’s Secret War’ (Friday 27 November, and now open for booking)
