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President, Officers & Councillors

The Society’s Council & Governance

The Royal Historical Society is predominantly a voluntary organisation. Its Council (the Society’s trustees) is made up of RHS Fellows each of whom serves a four-year term working on our various committees and working parties.

Selected members of Council hold Officer posts with responsibility for, among other areas, research and education policy or publishing. Council is led by the RHS President who also serves a four-year term. Every year the Fellowship elects three new members of Council using a preferential voting system. Council members come from a wide variety of backgrounds and research interests.

 

The Royal Historical Society President

Professor Emma Griffin

Emma Griffin is Head of School and Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to joining QMUL in September 2023, Emma was Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia. Emma researches on the social and economic history of Britain during the period 1700-1870, with a particular interest in gender history, the industrial revolution, and working-class life. Her most recent publications include Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) and Bread Winner. An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (2020), both published by Yale. She is also a former editor of History (the academic journal of the Historical Association) and of the Historical Journal.

Emma is a frequent contributor to radio and television, having written and presented several Radio 4 documentaries on diverse aspects of her research, from the history of fox-hunting, to the industrial revolution, to the gender pay gap and its history. She was a historical advisor for the Channel 4 drama, The Mill and co-presented The Real Mill with Tony Robinson on More4, and has appeared as an expert contributor on several radio and television programmes, including BBC1’s Who do you Think You Are? and Radio 4’s In Our Time.

Emma became the 35th President of the RHS in November 2020.

Officers of the Royal Historical Society

Professor Lucy Noakes
President-Elect of the Royal Historical Society

Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a social and cultural historian of early to mid 20th-century Britain. Appointed President-Elect and a Member of the RHS Council in January 2024, Lucy will take up the Presidency of the Royal Historical Society in November 2024.

As a specialist in the history of modern Britain, Lucy researches the experience and memory of those who have lived through conflict, with a particular focus on the First and Second World Wars. Her recent monographs include Dying for the Nation. Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (2020) and War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity 1939-1991 (revised edition 2023). Lucy’s work has made extensive use of the Mass Observation Archive, of which she is now a trustee.

Before joining the University of Essex in 2017, Lucy Noakes held academic posts at the universities of Southampton Solent, Portsmouth and Brighton.

Professor Clare Griffiths
Vice President of the Royal Historical Society

Clare Griffiths is Head of History and Professor of Modern History in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University. In November 2023 she was appointed Vice President of the Royal Historical Society.

Prior to taking up her current position in Cardiff, she taught at the University of Sheffield, Wadham College, Oxford, and the University of Reading, and she has held visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Museum of English Rural Life.

Clare’s research focuses on the political and cultural history of Britain in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the history of the countryside, agriculture and landscape. She is the author of Labour and the Countryside: the Politics of Rural Britain, 1918-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2007) and co-editor of Class, Cultures and Politics (OUP 2011). Her published articles and essays include work on political debates in Britain during the Second World War, the commemoration and historical memory of early nineteenth-century radicalism, and many aspects of British farming and rural life. She has also written extensively for the Times Literary Supplement, particularly on visual art.

Clare was a member of the Society’s Council from 2018 to 2021, during which time she served on, and subsequently chaired the Research Support Committee.

Dr John Law
Treasurer of the Royal Historical Society

John Law was, until his retirement, a Research Fellow in History at the University of Westminster. He was elected Treasurer of the Royal Historical Society in November 2023.

John joined the academic world later than is usual, completing his PhD when he was 54 years old. John’s work considers the experience of modernity in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. He is the author of several academic books. His latest, A World Away, was published by McGill Queen’s University Press in 2022, and examines the impact of holiday package tours on the people of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. John was a council member and trustee at the University of Sussex from 2011 to 2017.

Prior to academia, John was a partner at PwC and an executive at IBM. In these roles, he provided consulting advice to the world’s largest financial institutions. He is also a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Dr Adam Budd
Secretary for Education and Chair of the Education Policy Committee

Adam Budd is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History and Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

Adam’s research focuses on authorship and print culture during eighteenth century, and on the development of history as an academic discipline. Prior to being appointed Secretary for Education, Adam served as an elected member of the RHS Council, between 2018 and 2022. As Secretary for Education, Adam is responsible for the Society’s policy on higher education and support for teaching.

Adam co-authored the RHS Report on Race, Ethnicity and Equality (2018) and has been involved in developing merit-based funding initiatives for early-career researchers, in addition to chairing RHS scholarship awards and research prizes. He is active with the Higher Education Academy and has led numerous Widening Participation initiatives. His latest book is Circulating Enlightenment: The Career and Correspondence of Andrew Millar, 1725-68 (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Professor Barbara Bombi
Secretary for Research and Chair of the Research Policy Committee

Barbara Bombi is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kent. Her research interests cover ecclesiastical and religious history in the High Middle Ages (1200-1450). Barbara was elected RHS Secretary of Research and Chair of the Research Policy Committee in November 2023. In this role, Barbara oversees the Society’s work in speaking for historians on issues related to research and funding. Prior to this she served as an elected member of the RHS Council, 2019-23.

Barbara specialises in the medieval papacy and canon law, the Crusades of the early 13th century, and the history of the Military Orders. Her most recent monograph is Anglo-Papal Relations in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Study in Medieval Diplomacy (2019), published by Oxford University Press. Barbara was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Professor Jane Winters
Vice-President and Chair of the Publications Committee

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital History at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Jane has led or co-directed a range of digital humanities projects, including — most recently — Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; Digging into Linked Parliamentary Metadata; Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data; The Thesaurus of British and Irish History as SKOS; and Born Digital Big Data and Approaches for History and the Humanities.

A former RHS Council member, Jane became Vice-President, Publications in 2020 with oversight of the Society’s print and online publications and the RHS’s contribution to debates on humanities publishing.

Councillors of the Royal Historical Society

Dr Stefan Bauer

Dr Stefan Bauer is Lecturer in Early Modern World History at King’s College London. He previously held positions at Warwick, Royal Holloway, York, Rome, and Trento.

Stefan is an intellectual and cultural historian of early modern Europe; his research interests cover humanism, church history, religious polemic, and forgeries. Among his books are The Image of the Polis and the Concept of Democracy in J. Burckhardt’s History of Greek Culture; The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the Popes in the Sixteenth Century; The Invention of Papal History; and — most recently — A Renaissance Reclaimed. Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered, co-edited with Simon Ditchfield (2022).

Stefan enjoys writing for different audiences and has contributed to The Tablet, The Spectator USA, Literary Review and History Today. He has curated exhibitions at the York Minster and the Middle Temple, London. Stefan is Director of Social Media at the Sixteenth Century Society, and a co-editor of Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources. Stefan was elected to the Council of the Royal Historical Society in September 2021.

Professor Caitríona Beaumont

Professor Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University and Director of Research for the School of Law and Social Sciences.  Her research focuses on the history of female activism and women’s movements in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and Ireland. Her book, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1918-64 was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press.

Recent journal articles and chapters feature research relating to gender and the interwar peace movement, the print culture of the Women’s Institutes and the Mothers’ Union and the application of social movement theory to the Irish suffrage and women’s movement. She is currently working on a history of intergenerational female activism in Britain, 1960-1980. She has also contributed web content to The British Library and 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War.

Caitríona sits on the editorial boards of Twentieth Century British History and Contemporary British History, is a member of Women’s History Network, Social History Society, Voluntary Action History Society and the Women’s History Association of Ireland, and co-convenes the IHR Contemporary British History Seminar Series. She was elected to the RHS Council in September 2021.

Dr Kate Bradley

Dr Kate Bradley is Reader in Social History & Social Policy in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. Her research  covers the history of social policy in the 20th century, and how voluntary, state and private welfare services are accessible (or not) to citizens. Her most recent book is Lawyers for the Poor: Legal Advice, Voluntary Action and Citizenship in England, 1890-1990 (Manchester UP, 2019). This project examined the campaigning and hands-on pro bono legal advice provision of individual lawyers, political parties, trade unions, charities, the press, and community activist groups, in order to try to uphold the rights of the neediest.

Kate joined the University of Kent in 2007, having previously held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Centre for Contemporary British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Kate was elected to the RHS Council in September 2022. Prior to this appointment, she has served the historical community in several ways: co-founding History Lab in 2005, co-convening History UK in 2015-16, and as a member of the Social History Society committee since 2017.

Dr Melissa Calaresu

Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She has written on the cultural history of the Grand Tour, urban space, ice cream, and street-vending in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on Naples. Her books include New Approaches to Naples c.1500–c.1800: The Power of Place (2013) and Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present Day (2016).

Melissa has extensive experience of teaching and research, expertise in a wide range of neighbouring disciplines. She is currently writing a cultural history of the city of Naples through the household accounts of the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803).

Professor Mark Knights

Mark Knights is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and was elected to the Council of the Royal Historical Society in November 2023. His research focuses on early modern political culture in Britain and its empire, and on the history of corruption.

Mark’s most recent publication is Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire 1600-1850 (OUP 2021). He is currently working on a cultural biography of a seventeenth-century merchant philosopher; a book charting the history of corruption in Britain and its empire from the 1620s to the 2020s; and the Oxford Handbook of the History of Corruption.

Mark is a member of the editorial boards of Boydell and Brewer’s ‘Eighteenth Century Studies’ series and of the journal Parliamentary History. He has held numerous posts in his department and University.

Professor Rebekah Lee

Rebekah Lee is Associate Professor in African Studies at Oxford University, which she joined in January 2022, and a former Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Rebekah’s research interests concern the social and cultural history of modern South Africa, and the history of health and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, and curricular and pedagogical issues at all levels of history education. Rebekah’s most recent publication is Health, Healing and Illness in African History published by Bloomsbury in 2021. She is an editor of the interdisciplinary Journal of Southern African Studies. Rebekah is currently completing the manuscript of her latest book, Death and Memory in Modern South Africa.

Rebekah was elected to the RHS Council in September 2020.

Professor Simon MacLean

Simon MacLean is Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. A historian of Western Europe in the earlier Middle Ages, Simon’s research focuses on the Carolingian Empire and its successor kingdoms, 8th-12th centuries, and medieval queenship. His work has been published in numerous forums since 1998, and his most recent book is Ottonian Queenship (Oxford, 2017).

Simon has been involved in administration of teaching and postgraduate matters at the University of St Andrews for over a decade, and since 2018 has been Head of School. He has broad experience of the issues affecting the teaching and learning of history in modern academia.

Simon was elected to the Council of the RHS in September 2020.

Professor Iftikhar H. Malik

Iftikhar H. Malik is Professor-Emeritus at Bath Spa University, where he taught history for 27 years, following his five-year fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Presently, a member the Common Room at Wolfson College in Oxford, his Curating Lived Islam in the Muslim World: British Scholars, Sojourners and the Sleuths with Routledge came out in June 2021.

In November 2022, his The Silk Road and Beyond: Narratives of a Muslim Historian (Oxford University Press, 2020), received the UBL Award for the best non-fiction work in English in Pakistan.

Iftikhar’s other studies include Pashtun Identity and Geopolitics in Southwest Asia: Pakistan and Afghanistan since 9/11 (Anthem, 2016 & 2017); Crescent between Cross and Star: Muslims and the West after 9/11, (OUP, 2006); and Islam and Modernity: Muslims in Western Europe and the United States (Pluto, 2003). Iftikhar was elected to the RHS Council in November 2023.

Dr Emilie Murphy

Emilie Murphy is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York. She is a specialist of the cultural and religious history of England, and English-speaking people abroad, 1500-1700. Her scholarship focuses on sound and hearing, voice and language, and various aspects of performance culture. She is co-editor of Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, and her essays have appeared in several major journals including Renaissance Quarterly, The Historical Journal and Renaissance Studies. Her current research project is The Reformation of the Soundscape in Early Modern England and she is a lead investigator on the AHRC funded research network, ‘Soundscapes in the Early Modern World’. 

Emilie enjoys sharing her research with a public audience, and has appeared as an expert contributor radio and television programmes including BBC 1’s Countryfile, and BBC Radio 4’s Making History.

Dr Helen Paul

Dr Helen Paul is a Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton. A historian of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century, her work focuses primarily on the South Sea Company and enslavement.

Helen’s publications include The South Sea Bubble: an Economic History of its Origins and Consequences (2011) and she is a frequent contributor on programmes such as Radio 4’s In Our Time.

Helen was elected a Councillor of the Royal Historical Society in September 2022. She was previously, for six years, Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society (EHS) and has also served as chair of the EHS Women’s Committee.

Professor Olwen Purdue

Olwen Purdue is Professor of Modern Social History at Queen’s University, Belfast where she works on the social history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland with a particular focus on social class, urban poverty and welfare. Olwen directs the Centre for Public History at Queen’s and is particularly interested in the role of public history in divided societies.

Olwen’s publications include The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1870-1960 (2009); The Irish Lord Lieutenancy 1541-1922 (2012); Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018); and The First Great Charity of this Town: Belfast Charitable Society and its Role in the Developing City (2022). Her new monograph, Workhouse Child: Poverty, Child Welfare and the Poor Law in industrial Belfast, 1880-1918, is due out with Liverpool University Press in 2023, and an edited collection on Difficult Public Histories in Ireland is due out with Routledge in 2024. Olwen was formerly international editor for The Public Historian and is currently series editor for Liverpool University Press’ Nineteenth-Century Ireland series.

Olwen was elected to the RHS Council in September 2022. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Irish Museums Association, a member of the advisory board for the Ulster Museum, and a Governor of the Linen Hall Library.

Dr Emily Robinson

Emily Robinson is a Reader in British Studies at the University of Sussex and a historian of modern Britain, specialising in political ideas, identities, emotions and traditions.

Emily’s recent publications include The Language of Progressive Politics in Modern Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and articles in the Historical Journal, Twentieth Century British History, Rethinking History and Journal of the History of Ideas. Her next book, An Emotional History of Brexit Britain, co-authored with Jonathan Moss and Jake Watts, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023.

Emily was elected to the Council of the Royal Historical Society in September 2020.

Dr Andrew Smith

Andrew W.M. Smith is Director of Liberal Arts at Queen Mary University of London. His work focuses principally on the French and Francophone world with an interest in identities beyond the frame of the nation state. Recent articles have addressed minority nationalism, decolonisation, the Second World War, and linguistic politics.

Andrew is the author of Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, September 2016), and editor (with Chris Jeppesen) of Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? (UCL Press, March 2017). Andrew was previously the Society’s Honorary Director of Communications and RHS Honorary Secretary between 2021-23.

 

History in the News

Dr Susan Cohen ‘Eleanor Rathbone and the Refugees’

2016 marks the 70th anniversary of the death of the independent MP, Eleanor Rathbone. Known as ‘the MP for refugees’ her campaigns on behalf of refugees in the Interwar and 2WW period have a strong resonance with the current crisis, carrying a powerful message as pertinent today as it was then. 

Dr Susan Cohen’s monograph Rescue the Perishing: Eleanor Rathbone and the Refugees was published in 2010. She is currently researching the role of women within refugee organisations in Britain before and during the Second World War. Susan is co-founder of the Remembering Eleanor Rathbone group.

holocaust-memorial-day-2016-themeThe theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year was ‘Don’t stand by’, a salutary reminder of the duty we all have, as responsible citizens, to speak out on behalf of people who are being oppressed or persecuted. Following the family motto ’what ought to be done, can be done’ Eleanor Rathbone, Independent MP for the Combined English Universities from 1929, embraced this obligation, devoting her working life to the needs of the under-represented in society, regardless of race, religion or gender. She never had a plan in her mind, but instead took up causes that came to her attention and which called for a strong advocate, moving seamlessly from national social and welfare concerns, equality for women, eliminating child poverty, improving housing and a host of other injustices. As a parliamentarian, only one of fourteen women returned in the 1929 election, she put her skills to good use, becoming the most powerful backbencher of the time.

EleanorRathbone GR

Portrait of Eleanor Rathbone by Sir James Gunn, NPG

She extended the scope of her activism to Britain’s colonies, and to Palestine, then ruled under a British mandate, with feminist issues at the heart of her work. But it was the refugee cause, precipitated by Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in January 1933 that set her on a path that was to literally exhaust her, hastening her untimely death in January 1946. An anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi and anti-appeaser, she was the only female politician to denounce the new Nazi regime when the House of Commons met on 13 April 1933, warning of the dangers the regime posed to world peace. Presciently, she spoke of how the Nazis were “inflicting cruelties and crushing disabilities on large numbers of law-abiding peaceful German citizens, whose only offence is that they belong to a particular race or religion or profess certain political beliefs.” These were the very people whom she came to support, and for whom she became the most outspoken critic of government policy.

by Howard Coster, half-plate film negative, 1938

Duchess of Atholl, 1938, NPG

In 1937 she and her fellow MP, Katherine, Duchess of Atholl, organised the rescue of some 4,000 children from the Basque combat zone during the Spanish Civil War and when Eleanor and her allies found out, in early 1939, that more Republicans were at risk of summary executions and reprisals, and that the British government was unwilling to help rescue them or offer protection for rescue vessels, they simply circumvented officialdom. Ships were organised to run the blockade and the National Joint Committee succeeded in getting several boatloads of refugees out, and to safety. But it was the fateful events of 1938 that completely altered the landscape – from the annexation of Austria in March; the orchestrated anti-Jewish pogroms across Germany and Austria, ‘Kristallnacht’, of 9/10 November; and the intervening signing of the Munich agreement in September, which gave the Nazis carte blanche to occupy the Sudetenland in West Czechoslovakia. The latter in particular created an unprecedented refugee crisis as thousands of people, including but not exclusively Jews, sought safety in, and then escape from Prague.

Eleanor Rathbone felt a personal responsibility for Britain’s part in this human disaster, and in response set up, and led her purely voluntary Parliamentary Committee on Refugees in November 1938, quickly gathering more than 200 supporting MPs. The remit of the PCR was:

to influence the Government and public opinion in favour of a generous yet carefully safeguarded refugee policy, including large-scale schemes of permanent settlement inside or outside of Empire; also, since thousands of refugees would perish while awaiting such schemes – temporary reception homes in this country where refugees can be maintained, sorted out and eventually migrated, except in cases where their abilities can be profitably utilised here without injustice to our own workers.”

Jewish refugees.

Jewish refugees cross from Czechoslovakia to Bratislava. Photo: Getty Images

The remit has an uncanny resonance with the current refugee crisis. With some minor alterations, it could have been written in 2016. The Czech refugees were now at the heart of Eleanor Rathbone’s campaigning activities as she urged the government to issue more visa, relax entry restrictions and make good their promise of a loan to Czechoslovakia. The outbreak of war meant the cancellation of any outstanding visas, and dashed hopes of escape, so she now turned her attention to refugees at home, as she championed their fair and humane treatment. Now considered enemy aliens, and classified by a tribunal system, there were some 55,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria amongst the approximatly 80,000 refugees living here at the time. Some 6,782 in Category B, had mobility restrictions imposed upon them, affecting their ability to work and to be financially independent. Employers were desperate to take on suitable refugee workers, but permits were taking forever to be issued. This treatment, she argued, was counter-productive . It struck at the heart of her sense of justice and she did everything in her power to ameliorate the situation. But she was always patriotic, and never lost sight of the priority, which was the safety of the country and its citizens.

21st May 1940: A British soldier guarding an internment camp for 'enemy aliens', at Huyton housing estate in Liverpool. (Photo by Marshall/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Internment camp in Liverpool, May 1940. Photo: Getty images

Deputations, questions, letters, phone calls, liaising with every refugee committee and activist, and enlisting the support of other MPs were all part of her armoury. The mass internment of around 27,600 enemy aliens in May 1940 served only to exacerbate an already challenging situation and to plunge Eleanor Rathbone and her committee into a maelstrom of activity as they sought the release of thousands of refugees. She put over 80 parliamentary questions on internment alone; the issues pursued including the importance of separating Nazi internees from non-Nazis; the shocking living conditions in many of the camps; the food shortages and lack of medical care. Once again the parallels with refugee camps and detention centres for asylum seekers cannot be ignored. The response to Rathbone’s urgent requests for a more generous immigration policy followed a pattern, including claims that it would fuel domestic anti-Semitism. In a desperate effort at countering this assertion, in late 1942 she established the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror. The remit was to disseminate information at home about the mass extermination of Jews in Europe (information that the BBC in particular was unwilling to broadcast) and to promote small scale rescue missions. Despite the lack of success, the fact that Eleanor doggedly pursued these goals in the face of government intransigence and kept the subject in the public eye, is testimony to her humanity and determination.

Poignant words, written in 1943, highlight the struggle she envisaged people would have to expiate their shame:

If peace came tomorrow, we could not forget the millions for whom it would come too late, nor wash our hands of the stain of blood.’”

Nor was she able to hide her shame at Britain’s myopia, for she was convinced that with:

…greater foresight, courage (sic) there would have been no war, and if our policy towards refugees had been less miserably cautious, selfish and unimaginative, thousands of those already dead or in danger of death, might now be free and happy, contributing from their rich store of talent and industry to the welfare of mankind.”  [i]

Today’s political situation is not the same as that which prevailed during the Second World War. But Eleanor Rathbone’s assessment of the official response to the humanitarian disaster then resonates with the current crisis now. Calls for an imaginative and generous response reflect her belief that Britain’s tradition of liberty, generosity and asylum were of profound importance, even in wartime.

[i] EFR `Speech notes on the Refugee Question’, 16 December 1942. RP XIV. 3.85.

Eleanor Rathbone died 70 years ago in January 1946, and is being commemorated at various events throughout the year. Her refugee work will be remembered at a one-day conference being held in central London on Monday 20 June 2016, World Refugee Day. Welcome to Britain? Refugees Then and Now. A conference in memory of Eleanor Rathbone 1872-1946, the ‘MP for refugees’.

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Featured News

New to Teaching History 2022: An Interactive Workshop

8 August 2022

Participants in this interactive online workshop, sponsored by the Royal Historical Society and History UK, will develop their understanding of key issues relating to teaching History in higher education, from innovations in teaching and learning and curriculum design to teaching seminar groups and giving lectures.

All those who are new to teaching History in higher education – i.e. about to begin or recently-started – are eligible to attend, including PhD students, postdocs, ECRs and new lecturers. The workshop will be delivered by a group of experienced and innovative teachers of History in HE. Participants should be prepared to engage actively in the sessions; we will be leaving plenty of time for questions and discussion.

More about this RHS event and booking

 

Royal Historical Society Prizes & Awards: Winners, 2022

22 July 2022

 

Many congratulations to all of the winners and runners-up in this year’s Royal Historical Society Prizes & Awards in research, publishing and teaching.

This year’s winners were announced on Friday 22 July, along with recipients of the Society’s PhD Fellows 2022-23, held in association with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

A full listing of the 2022 recipients is available via the Society’s blog, along with acceptance speeches from the winners of this year’s Gladstone and Whitfield first book awards: Dr Emily Bridger and Dr Kristin Hussey.

More about this RHS news item

 

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Funded Workshops

21 July 2022

The Editors of the Society’s journal, Transactions of the RHS, now seek proposals for one-day workshops in which participants engage with a historical, methodological, or pedagogical problem with the intention of publishing the discussion in the journal.

To support this, the Society is funding two academic workshops — to the sum of up to £1000 per event — to bring together scholars to facilitate debate, and lead to publication of proceedings as article/s in a future issue of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. This call is open and not restricted by historical subject or approach.

By offering up to £1000 per workshop, the journal’s Editors — Harshan Kumarasingham and Kate Smith — seek to support colleagues in developing ideas for a discussion, review, or roundtable piece, which will then be submitted to the journal.

More about this RHS news item

 

Society launches new toolkit ‘Supporting History Teaching and Research in UK Universities’

25 May 2022

A number of UK History departments have recently been faced with, or are experiencing, cuts to programmes and staff, or mergers with other disciplines.

As part of its advocacy role, the Royal Historical Society works with historians and heads of department who face significant change to their professional lives. Some of this work is ‘behind the scenes’ in communication with departments and university managers. Other aspects of this role include the provision of commentaries and resources to support historians, as best we can.

We have now brought these resources together as a toolkit ‘Supporting History Teaching and Research in UK Universities’.

More about this RHS news item

 

Society and partners award seven fellowships to Ukrainian scholars at risk

18 May 2022

The Royal Historical Society is very pleased to announce the award of fellowships to seven Ukrainian historians and Slavonic and East European Studies scholars unable to continue their work at home universities. The seven recipients will take up their positions at UK and European universities very shortly, with the hope of several more fellowships to follow in the near future.

The Ukraine ‘Scholars at Risk’ programme began in March 2022 with a partnership between the Royal Historical Society and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) who jointly pledged to fund four fellowships, with assistance from the Past & Present Society (P&P).

Additional funding from two more learned societies — the German Historical Society and the Ecclesiastical History Society — has made further fellowships possible. An extra position has been generated through public donations to a recent fundraising campaign by the Royal Historical Society and BASEES. At the time of writing, the Society of Antiquaries of London has also elected to support the scheme and will be providing an additional, eighth Fellowship.

More about this RHS news item

 

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HEADER IMAGE: New York Daily News, 1888 (detail), by William Michael Harnett (1848–1892), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public collection

 

RHS Whitfield Prize Winners

1977
K.D. Brown, John Burns (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1977)

1978
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1978)

1979
Patricia Crawford, Denzil Holles, 1598-1680: A study of his Political Career (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1979)

1980
D. L. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents: A History (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1979)

1981
Scott M. Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536-7 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1981)

1982
Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History: 1982)

1983
Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A social history, 1200-1830 (Longman, 1983)

1984
David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Hutchinson, 1984)

1985
K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge University Press, 1985)

1986
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County,1500- 1600 (Clarendon Press, 1986)

1987
Kevin M. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The politics of literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

1988
J.H. Davis, Reforming London, the London Government Problem, 1855-1900 (Clarendon Press, 1988)

1989
A.G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200-1540 (Clarendon Press, 1989)

1990
Duncan M. Tanner, Political change and the Labour party, 1900-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

1991
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

1992
Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401 -1499 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

1993
Jeanette M. Neeson, Commoners: common right; enclosure and social change in England,1700- 1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

1994
V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English people, 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press, 1994)

1995
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

1996
Paul D. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experience in England, 1560-1640 (Clarendon Press, 1996)

1997
Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: the legacy of evangelicalism in four nineteenth century families (Clarendon Press, 1997)

1998
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 1998)

1999
John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Past and Present Publications, 1999)

2000
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Clarendon Press, 2000)

2001
John Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth Century Almshouse (Routledge, 2001)
and
Frank Salmon, Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (Ashgate, 2001)

2002
Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

2003
Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

2004
M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral reform in England,1787-1886 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

2005
Matt Houlbrooke, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

2006
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2006)

2007
Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2007)
and
Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton University Press, 2007)

2008
Stephen M. Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801-1827 (RHS/Boydell & Brewer:2008)
and
Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press: 2008)

2009
Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-ownership, Compensation and British Society at the end of Slavery (Cambridge University Press: 2009)

2010
Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge University Press: 2010)

2011
Jaqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy,1660-1688, (Cambridge University Press: 2011)

2012
Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain. Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights, (Cambridge University Press: 2012)

2013
Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and The Glorious Revolution (Harvard University Press: 2013)

From this point the prize is awarded for and presented in the year following publication.

2015
John Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300 (Oxford University Press, 2014)

2016
Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

2017
William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
and
Alice Taylor, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124-1290 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

2018
Brian N Hall, Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

2019
Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

2020
Niamh Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (Bloomsbury, 2019)

2021
Jackson Armstrong, England’s Northern Frountier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
and
Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

2022
Kristin D. Hussey for Imperial Bodies in London. Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

2023
Síobhra Aiken for Spiritual Wounds. Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Irish Academic Press, 2022)

 

Professor Catherine Holmes — RHS Lecture, 7 May 2021

Header for lecture

The repulsion of the Rus’ attack on Constantinople in 941 by the Byzantine fleet, C13th, Chronicle of John Skylitzes, cod. Vitr. 26-2, fol. 130, Madrid National Library, CC-0.

 

“The Making and Breaking of Kinetic Empire: Mobility, Communication and Political Change in the Eastern Mediterranean, c.950-1100 C.E.”

 

Professor Catherine Holmes (University of Oxford)Photograph of Dr Catherine Holmes
Friday 7 May 2021

18.00 BST – Live online via Zoom

 

Abstract

The final decades of the eleventh century were a period of immense geopolitical change for the eastern Mediterranean world. Invasions from the east (Turks) and west (Normans and Crusaders) reordered a political landscape hitherto balanced between the Byzantine empire in the north and the Fatimid caliphate in the south. It can be tempting to interpret this period as one when stable, early-medieval imperial formations with fixed administrative centres, carefully-choreographed ceremonial cultures, and palace-based elites were rapidly undone by outsiders whose power was mobile and fluid.

The picture of the geopolitics of the eastern Mediterranean put forward in this lecture is rather different. By working with ideas about kinetic empire developed for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America, I will suggest that putting mobility at the centre of our analysis can make sense not only of late eleventh-century change in the eastern Mediterranean, but also of the century between 950 and 1050 when the sedentary Byzantine and Fatimid empires were themselves expanding. That mobility was integral to the operation of power in states which are often viewed as ‘sedentary’ is an idea with increasing traction among medievalists.

But ‘mobility’ is a characteristic which requires breaking down so that its role can be more precisely gauged in particular contexts. In the case of Byzantium, harnessing the kinetic was fundamental to the practical ways in which the empire recruited to its armies and fought campaigns, but also to the construction and communication of an imperial ideology. Nor was Byzantium alone in this enterprise – parallels can be detected across western Eurasia and the Mediterranean in the same period. Nonetheless, probing the first-hand evidence for the kinetic enables us to see how little real world control those claiming imperial power often had over the movement that they attempted to channel, harness and celebrate in official communications.

Speaker biography

Catherine Holmes is Professor of Medieval History and a Fellow of University College, Oxford. A specialist in the politics and the culture of the Mediterranean world, including Byzantium, between the tenth and early fifteenth centuries, her research integrates Byzantine studies with the study of other regions of the medieval world. Together with Naomi Standen (Birmingham), Catherine recently edited The Global Middle Ages (Oxford, 2018), a Past and Present supplement volume which draws together the findings of a collaborative project funded by the AHRC.

Watch the lecture

 

 

 

RHS Panel – ‘Finding the Funny in Public History’

‘Finding the Funny in Public History’

In conversation with Greg Jenner

 

Greg Jenner

in conversation with Emma Griffin
held on 2 February 2024
at the Mary Ward House, London, and online

 

 

 

Listen to the Lecture

 

Watch the Lecture

Abstract

One of the UK’s best known public historians, Greg has brought history to new audiences through his engagement with popular culture. In ‘Finding the Funny in Public History’, Greg discussed his approach to communicating history, via different broadcast technologies, and also through comedy which is a common theme in his public history. As Greg shows with reference to his own work, the relationship between historical subject, medium and format is key for effective engagement with a chosen audience. How these elements are chosen and combined is an essential part of a series’ success or otherwise.

As well as drawing on Greg’s own work and approach, our event also considered popular media more broadly as a vehicle for public history. How can formats constrained by running times, deadlines and budgets reflect the balance and nuance required of effective historical work? What is the place of the trained historian in popular media representations of the past? And what are the possible formats by which future audiences will engage with historical subjects? On Tuesday 20 February, Greg was in conversation with Emma Griffin, President of the Royal Historical Society.

Speaker Biography

Greg Jenner is a public historian, author, and broadcaster well known for his work in podcasts, radio, TV, and publishing. He is the host and creator of the chart-topping comedy BBC podcast You’re Dead to Me, as well as the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Past Forward: A Century of Sound, the BBC’s award-nominated children’s podcast Homeschool History, and the Audible series A Somewhat Complete History of Sitting Down. From 2008-2019, Greg was responsible for the research and historical accuracy of the BBC’s multiple-BAFTA and EMMY-award-winning TV comedy sketch series Horrible Histories, and its BAFTA-nominated spinoff film Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans.

Greg’s publications include Ask A Historian: 50 Surprising Answers to Things You Always Wanted to Know (2021) and Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity, From Bronze Age To Silver Screen (2020). His bestselling illustrated children’s book You Are History: From the Alarm Clock to the Toilet, the Amazing History of the Things You Use Every Day was published in 2022, and his new children’s book series ‘Totally Chaotic History’ – cowritten with expert historians – will be published by Walker Books in 2024. In 2021 Greg was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society for his contribution to historical scholarship and understanding.

 

News

Here you’ll find news about key Royal Historical Society activities. Our social media channel @RoyalHistSoc and blog, Historical Transactions, also provide regular updates. In addition, Fellows and Members receive a weekly RHS News Circular, providing updates on RHS activities and events undertaken by historians across the UK.

Each November we publish an Annual Newsletter (print and online) as well as an online Letter from the Society’s President (each June). You can view the latest Newsletter (November 2023), while downloads of previous print Newsletters (2010-22) are available here.

 

Date
Headline
28 Mar 2024
New Historical Perspectives passes 100,000 book downloads
20 Mar 2024
Society awards six RHS Workshop Grants, 2024
15 Mar 2024
Call for Two Section Editors: Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH)
14 Mar 2024
Society visits historians at the universities of York and York St John
07 Mar 2024
Society discusses ‘Historical Legacies’ in Cardiff
06 Mar 2024
Current Research Funding Calls from Royal Historical Society
05 Mar 2024
‘Finding the Funny in Public History’, with Greg Jenner – recording now available
03 Mar 2024
Conference programme now available for ‘History and Archives in Practice, 2024’ in Cardiff
27 Feb 2024
Patrick, Lord Cormack (1939-2024)
26 Feb 2024
Introducing ‘Doing History in Public’ – a new 3-part Conversation for historians
1 2 3 11 Next › Last »

 

Society welcomes broadcaster and historian Greg Jenner to discuss comedy and history

At 6pm on Tuesday 20 February, the Royal Historical Society is delighted to welcome Greg Jenner to speak on ‘Finding the Funny in Public History’.

Greg is one of the UK’s most popular public historians, well known for his work in podcasts, radio, TV, and publishing. He is the host and creator of the chart-topping comedy BBC podcast You’re Dead to Me (‘the comedy podcast that takes history seriously’), as well as the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Past Forward: A Century of Sound, the BBC’s award-nominated children’s podcast Homeschool History, and the Audible series A Somewhat Complete History of Sitting Down.

On Tuesday 20 February, Greg is in conversation with the RHS President, Emma Griffin. Greg will discuss his approach to public history; the ways in which broadcasting formats shape how we communicate about the past; the importance of comedy in history education; and the importance of research and experts in creating high-quality public history.

 

This special RHS event takes place at Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, WC1H 9SN, and all are very welcome to attend. We hope this event will attract a wide audience, including from schools and colleges, as well as listeners and public historians. The event will include a conversation, followed by questions from our audience at the venue and online. For more about our ‘Evening with Greg Jenner’ and to reserve your seat/s, please click here.

If you’re unable to be there in person, the event will also be live-streamed and booking to watch online is available here.

 

RHS Alexander Prize Past Winners

1898 F. Hermia Durharn, ‘The relations of the Crown to trade under James I’.

1899 W.F. Lord, BA, ‘The development of political parties during the reign of Queen Anne’.

1900 No award.

1901 Laura M. Roberts, ‘The Peace of Luneville’.

1902 V.B. Redstone, ‘The social condition of England during the Wars of the Roses’.

1903 Rose Graham, ‘The intellectual influence of English monasticism between the tenth and the twelfth centuries’.

1904 Enid W.G. Routh, ‘The balance of power in the seventeenth century’.

1905 WAP. Mason, MA ‘The beginnings of the Cistercian Order’.

1906 Rachel R. Reid, MA ‘The Rebellion of the Earls, 1569’.

1907 No award.

1908 Kate Hotblack ‘The Peace of Paris, 1763’.

1909 Nellie Nield, MA ‘The social and economic condition of the unfree classes in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’. (Not published in Transactions).

1910 No award.

1911 No award

1912 H.G. Richardson ‘The parish clergy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’.

1913 – 1916 No award.

1917 Isobel D. Thornley, BA ‘The treason legislation of 1531 – 1534’.

1918 T.F.T. Plucknolt, BA ‘The place of the Council in the fifteenth century’.

1919 Edna F. White, MA ‘The jurisdiction of the Privy Council under the Tudors’. (Not published in Transactions).

1920 J.E. Neale, MA ‘The Commons Journals of the Tudor Period’.

1921 No award.

1922 Eveline C. A Martin, ‘The English establishments on the Cold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century’.

1923 E.W. Hensman, MA, ‘The Civil War of 1648 in the east midlands’.

1924 Grace Stretton, BA, ‘Some aspects of mediaeval travel’.

1925 F.A. Mace, .MA, ‘Devonshire ports in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’.

1926 Marian J. Tooley, MA, ‘The authorship of “Defensor Pacis”‘.

1927 W.A. Pantin, BA, ‘Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215-1540’.

1928 Gladys A. Thornton, BA, PhD, ‘A study in the history of Clare, Suffolk, with special reference to its development as a borough’.

1929 F.S. Rodkey, AM, PhD, ‘Lord Palmerston’s policy for the rejuvenation of Turkey, 1839- 1847’.

1930 A. Ettinger, DPhil, ‘The proposed Anglo-Franco-American Treaty of 1852 to guarantee Cubato Spain’.

1931 Kathleen A. Walpole, MA, ‘The humanitarian movement of the early nineteenth century to remedy abuses on emigrant vessels to America’.

1932 Dorothy M. Brodie, BA,, ‘Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII’.

1933 R.W. Southern, BA, ‘Ranulf Flambard and early Anglo-Norman administration’.

1934 S.B. Chrimes, MA, PhD, ‘Sir John Fortescue and his theory of dominion’.

1935 S.T. Bindoff, MA, ‘The unreformed diplomatic service, 1812-1860’.

1936 Rosamund J. Mitchell, MA, Blitt, ‘English students at Padua, 1460- 1475’.

1937 C.H. Philips, BA, ‘The East India Company “Interest, and the English Government of 1783-1784’.

1938 H.E.I. Phillips, BA, ‘The last years of the Court of Star Chamber, 1630- 1641’.

1939 Hilda P. Grieve, BA, ‘The deprived married clergy in Essex, 1553- 1561 ‘.

1940 R. Somerville, MA, ‘The Duchy of Lancaster Council and Court of Duchy Chamber’.

1941 R.A.L. Smith, MA, PhD, ‘The “Regimen Scaccarii” in English monasteries’.

1942 F.L. Carsten, DPhil, ‘Medieval democracy in the Brandenburg towns and its defeat in the fifteenth century’.

1943 No submissions made and no award.

1944 Rev. E.W. Kemp, BD, ‘Pope Alexander III and the canonization of saints’.

1945 Helen Suggett, BLitt, ‘The use of French in England in the later middle ages’.

1946 No award.

1947 June Milne, BA, ‘The diplomacy of John Robinson at the court of Charles II of Sweden, 1697-1709’.

1948 No award.

1949 Ethel Drus, MA, ‘The attitude of the Colonial Office to the annexation of Fiji’.

1950 Doreen J. Milne, MA, PhD, ‘The results of the Rye House Plot, and their influence upon the Revolution of 1688’

1951 K.G. Davles, BA, The origins of the commission system in the West India trade’.

1952 G.W.S. Barrow, BLitt, ‘Scottish rulers ant the religious orders, 1070-1153’.

1953 W.E. Minchinton, BSc(Econ), ‘Bristol – metropolis of the west in the eighteenth century’.

1954 Rev. L Boyle, OP, ‘The “Oculus Sacerdotis” and some other works of William of Pagula’.

1955 G.F.E. Rude, MA, PhD, ‘The Gordon riots: a study of the rioters and their victims’.

1956 No award.

1957 R F. Hunnisett, MA, DPhil, ‘The origins of the office of Coroner’.

1958 Thomas G. Barnes, AB, DPhil, ‘County politics and a puritan “cause celebre”: Somerset churchales, 1633’.

1959 Alan Harding, BLitt, ‘The origins and early history of the Keeper of the Peace’.

1960 Gwyn A. Wllliams, MA, PhD, ‘London and Edward I’.

1961 M.H. Keen, BA, ‘Treason trials under the law of arms’.

1962 G.W. Monger, MA, PhD, ‘The end of isolation: Britain, Germany and Japan, 1900-1092’.

1963 J.S. Moore, BA, ‘The Domesday teamland: a reconsideration’.

1964 M. Kelly, PhD, The submission of the clergy’.

1965 J.J.N. Palmer, BLitt, ‘Anglo-French negotiations, 1390-1396’.

1966 M.T. Clanchy, MA, PhD, ‘The Franchise of Return of Writs’.

1967 R. Lovatt, MA, DPhil, PhD, ‘The “Imitation of Christ” in late medieval England’.

1968 M.G.A Vale, MA, DPhil, ‘The last years of English Gascony, 1451-1453’.

1969 No award.

1970 Mrs. Margaret Bowker, MA, BLitt, ‘The Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries in the light of some Archidiaconal Acta’.

1971 C. Thompson, MA, ‘The origins of the politics of the Parliamentary middle groups, 1625-1629’.

1972 I. d’Alton, BA, ‘Southern Irish Unionism: A study of Cork City and County Unionists, 1884-1914’.

1973 C.J. Kitching, BA, PhD, ‘The quest for concealed lands in the reign of Elizabeth I’.

1974 H. Tomlinson, BA, ‘Place and Profit: an Examination of the Ordnance Office, 1660-1714’.

1975 No award made for this year.

1976 B. Bradshaw, MA, BD, ‘Cromwellian reform’

1977 No award.

1978 C.J. Ford, BA, ‘Piracy or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400-1403’.

1979 P. Dewey, BA, PhD, ‘Food Production and Policy in the United Kingdom, 1914-1918’.

1980 Ann L. Hughes, BA, PhD, ‘Militancy and Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminster Politics, 1643- 1647’.

1981 C.J. Tyerman, MA, ‘Marino Sanudo Torsello and the Lost Crusade. Lobbying in the Fourteenth Century’.

1982 E. Powell, BA, DPhil, ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the Late Middle Ages’.

1983 A.G. Rosser, MA, ‘The essence Of medieval urban communities: the vill of Westminster,1200- lS40’.

1984 N.L. Ramsay, MA, LLB, ‘Retained legal Counsel, c.1275-1475’.

1985 George S. Garnett, MA, ‘Coronation and Propaganda: Some Implications of the Norman Claim to the Throne Of England in 1066’.

1986 C.J. Given-Wilson, ‘The King and the Gentry in Fourteenth Century England’.

1987 No award.

1988 R.A.W. Rex, .NIA, ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’.

1989 J.S.A. Adamson, BA, PhD, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’.

1990 Shelley C. Lockwood, BA, ‘Marsilius of Padua and the Case for the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy’.

1991 David L. Smith, MA, PhD, ‘Catholic, Anglican or Puritan? Edward Sacksville, Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Ambiguities of Religion in Early Stuart England.’

1992 Giles Worsley, MA, PhD, ‘The Origins of the Gothic Revival: A Reappraisal’.

1993 Clifford J. Rogers, BA, MA, PhD, ‘Edward III and the Dialects of Strategy’.

1994 Joseph Charles Heim, BA, MA, PhD, ‘Liberalism and the Establishment of Collective Security in British Foreign Policy’.

1995 Rachel Gibbons, BA, ‘Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France: the creation of an historical villainess’.

1996 No award.

1997 Steve Hindle, MA, MA, PhD, ‘The Problem of Pauper Marriage in Seventeenth Century England’.

1998 Neil W. Hitchin, BA, MA, ‘The Politics of English Bible Translation in Georgian Britain’.

1999 Magnus Ryan, BA, MA, PhD, ‘Bartolus of Sassoferrato and Free Cities’.

2000 Helen Berry, BA, PhD, ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffee House and the Significance of Flash Talk’.

2001 No award.

2002 Quintin Colville, BA, MA, ‘Jack Tar and the gentleman officer: the role of uniform in shaping class- and gender- related identities of British naval personnel, 1930-1939’.

2003 No award.

2004 Ian Mortimer, BA, MA, RMSA, FRHistS, ‘The Triumph of the Doctors: Medical Assistance to the Dying c.1570-1720’

2005 No award.

2006 Sethina Watson, ‘The Origins of the English Hospital’

From this point the prize is awarded for the year of publication of the article, and presented in the year following publication.

2007 Alice Rio, ‘Freedom and Unfreedom in Early medieval Francia: the Evidence of the LegalFormulae’ in Past and Present 193 (2006)

2008 Mary Partridge, ‘Thomas Hoby’s English Translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier’ in The Historical Journal, 50 (2007), pp. 769-786

2009 No award.

2010 George Molyneaux, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’ in English Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 1289–1323

2011 Richard Huzzey, ‘Free trade, free labour, and slave sugar in Victorian Britain’ in Historical Journal, 53, 2 (2010)

2012 Levi Roach, ‘Public Rites and Public Wrongs: Ritual Aspects of Diplomas in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, in Early Medieval Europe, vol. 19, (2011).

2013 Jasper Heinzen, ‘Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions: The Napoleonic Wars in British and Hanoverian Memory, 1815-1915’ in English Historical Review, vol. 27, no. 529 (2012)

2013 David Veevers, ‘”The Company as their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah”: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685-1740’ in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 5 (2013), pp. 687-709

From this point the prize is awarded for and presented in the year following publication.

2015 Ryan Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, Slavery & Abolition 35:1 (2015) (published online Sep 2014).

2016 Mary Cox, ‘Hunger Games: Or how the Allied Blockade in World War I Deprived German Children of Nutrition, and Allied Food Aid Subsequently Saved them’, Economic History Review, 68: 2, (2015), 600-31.

2017 Stephanie Mawson, ‘Convicts or Conquistadores?: Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth Century Pacific’, Past and Present, 232:1 (2016), 87-125.

2018 Marcus Colla, ‘Prussian Palimpsests: Architecture and Urban Spaces in East Germany, 1945-1961,’ Central European History, 50 (2017), 184-217.

2019 Jake Richards, ‘Anti-Slave-Trade Law, “Liberated Africans” and the State in the South Atlantic World, c. 1839-1852’, Past and Present, 241 (2018), 170-219.

2020 Meira Gold, ‘Ancient Egypt and the Geological Antiquity of Man, 1847-1863’, History of Science, 57:2 (2019), 194-230.

2021 Matthew Birchall, ‘History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonisation in South Australia and New Zealand‘, Journal of Global History, 16 (2020), 141-57.

2022 Tamara Fernando, ‘“Seeing Like the Sea”: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery, 1800-1925’, Past and Present (February 2021), 127-60

and

Anna McKay, ‘”Allowed to Die?” Prison Hulks, Convict Corpses and the Enquiry of 1847’, Cultural and Social History (May 2021), 163-81.

2023 Jake Dyble, ‘General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe’, Historical Journal, 65 (2022), 1197-1220.

and

Roseanna Webster, ‘Women and the Fight for Urban Change in Late Francoist Spain’, Past & Present (October 2022)

 

 

ECH Publishing: Other Formats

 

 

A very large majority of the work published by historians appears in one of these three formats – journal articles, chapters in books, books. These formats allow for the evidence intensive and subject-extensive treatment that history favours. But there are lots of other ways to publish, especially online, and these alternative formats tend to cater to other needs than the simple presentation of research. Some early-career scholars find that their first published words take the form of book reviews.

Journals receive lots of miscellaneous books for review and are often delighted to find someone – anyone – who knows enough about the subject to review them. There is a case to be made for only reviewing books after you’ve written one yourself – an experience that imposes a proper degree of modesty. (It also shows that, minimally, you know what you’re talking about.) If you don’t have a track record, be extra careful not to raise unrealistic expectations or to be too territorial.

Normally you should be given the chance to proofread the book review. And of course you get ‘payment’ in the form of the book. Forums and roundtables are increasingly popular formats in journals and on blogs. They are excellent formats for stimulating discussion (of controversial issues or influential books) and for broadening the range of voices. They’re normally by invitation only.

But you can be the host, if you can find a journal editor willing to entrust you with the task of putting together a forum. Often roundtables in print originate as live roundtables at conferences. They are chattier, usually shorter than full-size journal articles (say 3-4 contributions of 1-4,000 words each?), and don’t require the full scholarly apparatus, as they tend to be more argumentative and less loaded with evidence.

 

Online formats

Some traditional publications (like book reviews) now often appear in online-only formats. There is no reason why you cannot include them in your C.V., just as you might print book reviews. But be conservative. If there is really no difference between the online version and its print equivalent – if you were commissioned by a reputable book review site, and you submitted a full-length review with a stable URL – then surely it’s the functional equivalent of the print version.

But if it’s just a blog post, or some other more casual form of contribution, without apparatus, un-peer reviewed, it really has no place on your list of publications; it will just look like padding. Your CV is an accounting of your scholarly qualifications, not an advertisement.