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The Society resumes its 2025 events programme on Friday 12 September with a lecture by Professor Yasmin Khan on ‘Mars and Britannia: the Imperial Way of Warfare’. Yasmin’s lecture takes place at Mary Ward House, London at 6.30pm and is also available to watch online.

British military power around the world was dependent on non-European people for two hundred years. Yasmin’s lecture will demonstrate just how extensively British military history has relied on non-British people over continents and centuries.

 

 

Yasmin is Professor of Modern History in the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Her publications include The Raj at War: a People’s History of India’s Second World War (2015) and The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (2007) which was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Book Prize. Booking for in-person and online attendance at this lecture is now available.

 

 

This is followed, on Wednesday 17 September, with an RHS sponsored lecture at the University of Aberdeen, by Professor Matthew J. Smith (Director of the Centre for the Legacies of British Slave Ownership at University College London). Matthew’s subject is ‘Twice Removed: Slavery, Big Data, and the Cultures of Caribbean Ancestral Histories’, a study of the impact of digital humanities on the histories of the Caribbean and enslavement, and the growing prominence and importance of Black family history as one outcome of the growing prominence of digitised resources.

Booking for Matthew’s lecture, which takes place at the University of Aberdeen, is now open and we hope to welcome as many RHS Fellows and Members in the region to attend and join us for a reception. The lecture is part of the Society’s visit to historians at the University of Aberdeen on 17-18 September.

 

 

Our third autumn lecture also accompanies an RHS Visit, this time to the University of Ipswich at Suffolk. Our guest lecturer on this occasion (Wednesday 22 October) is Professor Tim Grady (University of Chester) who will speak on ‘Unravelling the Tapestry of Death: Britain and the Memory of the Two World Wars’.

This lecture — which takes place at The Hold, home to Suffolk Archives — considers the practice of war burial which saw British soldiers buried alongside Americans, French and Belgians who in turn mingled with the graves of enemy servicemen: Germans, Austrians and Italians. Booking to attend is now open to all and, again, we look forward to welcoming RHS Fellows and Members from the region to the lecture and reception which follows. Visits will be attended by the Society’s President, Professor Lucy Noakes, and members of the RHS Council.

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Details of events later in the year, including the 2025 RHS / Gresham Lecture in the Public Understanding of History, given this year by Daniel Finkeslstein (6pm Tuesday 4 November), are available from the Society’s events pages.

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HEADER IMAGE: iStock, credit: TheMountBirdStudio

 

The Royal Historical Society seeks to appoint a Membership and Office Administrator (0.8 FTE) to join its professional Office based at University College London. The post will help support and develop the Society’s activities with a particular focus on membership and research funding.

• Job Title: Membership and Office Administrator (part-time)
• Contract: 0.8 FTE (4 days a week). Fixed Term. 12 months in the first instance, with potential for extension to permanent
• Salary: UCL Non-clinical pay scale: spine point 16, currently £31,904 including London weighting at full time, pro-rated to £25,523 at 0.8FTE
• Location: Hybrid – remote and with some attendance in the RHS Office (UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT).
• Application closing date: 23:59 BST, Monday 7 September 2025
• Start Date: As soon as possible after interviews; interviews are expected to take place in week commencing Monday 6 October 2025

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Further details of the Membership and Office Administrator role are available here, with applications made via the RHS Jobs Portal.

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We seek a highly capable Membership and Office Administrator to support the work of the Society’s professional Office based at University College London. The role will focus primarily on supporting and communicating with the Society’s extensive membership, which largely comprises practising historians in higher education and other sectors, as well as prospective members, applicants for the Society’s extensive research funding programme, and members of the public.

The role holder will report to the Membership and Programmes Manager and will also assist in the running of the Society’s research funding schemes. This is a hybrid position which supports home / remote working as the predominant model. As part of a small Office team, the post holder will in addition assist with the administration and efficient running of the Office on a daily basis. The Society offers an employer contributor pension of 12% and a friendly, supportive and highly professional working environment.

 

The Society is very pleased to announce publication of its latest Camden series volume: The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541), edited by Helen Newsome-Chandler.

This volume presents the surviving holograph correspondence of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots as a stand-alone edition for the first time. The 111 holograph letters (written in Margaret’s own hand) and 4 ‘hybrid’ letters (written by a scribe, with a postscript or subsection by Margaret herself) form an unprecedented epistolary archive, featuring the largest collection of holograph correspondence written in English or Scots of any medieval or early modern queen.

 

 

The letters chart Margaret’s life as a late medieval queen, including the challenges she faced in negotiating her dual identity as queen of Scots and an English princess, and her important role in Anglo-Scots politics and diplomacy in the early sixteenth century.

To mark publication of this important volume, the full text of The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541) is now available, free to read, via Cambridge University Press, until 30 September 2025.

The edition also provides a substantial Introduction which explores the archive of Margaret Tudor’s correspondence and a detailed biography, to enable readers to better understand the political and cultural context in which Margaret’s letters were originally written.

This new Camden edition also provides a handlist of Margaret’s remaining extant correspondence, which includes scribal letters, copies of original letters, and foreign language letters — the first time such a handlist has been published.

To accompany publication, the volume’s editor, Helen Newsome-Chandler, has also written for the Society’s blog, providing an introduction and guide to Margaret Tudor’s life and the collection.

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The online edition of The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541) is now available from Cambridge University Press. The print edition will be released later in August.

Full online access to all Camden Series titles is available to Fellows and Members of the Royal Historical Society as part of the Society’s member benefits.

This includes purchase of the print edition of the Holograph Letters (347pp) for the reduced price of £16. Fellows and Members of the Society who wish to purchase a print copy at this reduced rate should email: administration@royalhistsoc.org, providing their name and postal address, marking the email ‘Camden’.

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Camden volumes in 2025

The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541) is the second of three volumes in the Camden series to be published in 2025.

Other titles this year are The Papers of Admiral George Grey, edited by Michael Taylor (June 2025 and now available Open Access) and A Collector Collected: The Journals of William Upcott, 1803-1823, edited by Mark Philp, Aysuda Aykan and Curtis Leung — which is published in November.

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Recent volumes in the Camden series

Other recent volumes in the series include:

• The Household Accounts of Robert and Katherine Greville, Lord and Lady Brooke, at Holborn and Warwick, 1640-1649, edited by Stewart Beale, Andrew Hopper and Ann Hughes (November 2024).
• Allen Leeper’s Letters Home, 1908–1912. An Irish-Australian at Edwardian Oxford, edited by David Hayton (July 2024).
• The Last Days of English Tangier. The Out-Letter Book of Governor Percy Kirke, 1681–1683, edited by John Childs (November 2023).
• La Prinse et mort du roy Richart d’Angleterre, and Other Works by Jehan Creton, edited and translated by Lorna A. Finlay (June 2023).

Introductions to these and other recent Camden volumes are available from their editors via the Society’s blog.

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About the Camden series

The Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series is one of the most prestigious and important collections of primary source material relating to British History, including the British empire and Britons’ influence overseas.

The Society (and its predecessor, the Camden Society) has since 1838 published scholarly editions of sources—making important, previously unpublished, texts available to researchers. Each volume is edited by specialist historians who provide an expert introduction and commentary.

The complete Camden Series now comprises over 385 volumes of primary source material, ranging from the early medieval to late-twentieth century Britain. The full series is available via Cambridge Journals Online, providing an extraordinarily rich conspectus of source material for British history as well as insights into the development of historical scholarship in the English speaking world.

Full online access to all Camden Series titles is available to all Fellows and Members of the Royal Historical Society as part of the Society’s Member Benefits.

The Camden Series is edited by Dr Richard Gaunt (University of Nottingham) and Professor Siobhan Talbott (Keele University). Richard and Siobhan welcome submissions for future Camden volumes. If you have a proposal for a Camden Society volume, please complete and submit the Camden Series Proposal Form and send your completed proposal to the Editors: camden.editors@royalhistsoc.org.

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HEADER IMAGE: An Engagement Portrait, traditionally identified as of Margaret Tudor, the Regent Albany and a man in royal livery. Oil on canvas. 84cm x 117 cm. Courtesy of the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, detail.

 

Earlier this year, the Royal Historical Society launched a new strand of research funding to bring together historians working collaboratively across different sectors, including higher education, museums and archives, and public and community history.

The two new programmes — the Scouloudi Public History Grants and the Scouloudi Panel Grants — are made possible following a generous subvention to the Society by the Scouloudi Foundation.

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Scouloudi Public History Grants support innovative practice in public history and provide funding for defined projects by historians working together in and beyond higher education. In offering these grants, the Society seeks to encourage collaborative public history, and to provide necessary financial support for non-academic participants which is often unavailable through existing funding schemes.

Scouloudi Panel Grants support the formation of panels to present, in-person, research on a shared historical theme at an academic conference, or equivalent event, in history or a cognate discipline. The scheme supports the creation of panels, of up to four principal participants, whose formation would not otherwise have been possible, in their entirety, due to an absence of financial support.

In this way, the Society seeks to make possible collaborative conference participation and research dissemination at a time when budgets for event attendance and travel have been cut. The scheme also aims to support panel membership by independent historians with no access to funding for conference participation.

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The Society is pleased to announce the recipients of the first round of these two new award programmes:

Scouloudi Public History Grants, 2025-26

• Rachel Dishington (University of Nottingham) and Sarah Colborne (University of Nottingham Archives) , ‘Living and Working Along the Leen’
• Iqbal Singh (The National Archives) and Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS), ‘Participatory workshops on colonial history for historians in higher education, the GLAM sector and community history groups’
• Kathleen McIlvenna (University of Derby) and Kate Crossley (Arkwright Society) , ‘Re-interpreting Florence Nightingale in Derbyshire’
• Rachel Delman (Oxford) and James Spellane (The Charterhouse), ‘London’s Watery Heritage: Co-producing New Knowledge about the Charterhouse Water Maps’

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Scouloudi Panel Grants, 2025-26

• ‘Commons and Communities: Celebrating Professor Andy Wood’, with speakers Lily R. Chadwick, Mark Hailwood, Susannah Ottaway and Steve Hindle: to enable Lily Chadwick (Woodbrooke Centre, Birmingham) to participate in the panel, to take place at the 2025 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) in Montreal in November.
• ‘Continuities and Challenges: Women’s Politics and Activism in 1970s Britain’, with speakers Jessica White, Caitríona Beaumont, Ruth Davidson, Lyndsey Jenkins, and Laura Beers: to support members of the panel without alternative means of institutional financial support to participate in the panel, to take place at the 2025 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) in Montreal in November.

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The next call for applications for the Society’s Scouloudi Public History and Panel Grants is expected to open in Spring 2026 for projects and conferences in 2026-27.

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HEADER IMAGE: Map of London, 1698 Wenceslaus Hollar (detail), public domain, Wikimedia Commons

 

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death, on Saturday, of Professor Peter Marshall, former Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London and President of the Royal Historical Society between 1996 and 2000.

Peter’s association with the Society spanned more than 50 years. Elected a Fellow in 1969, he served as a member of the Society’s Council between 1983 to 1987, thereafter becoming Vice President until November 1991. He returned to the Council in November 1996 as President and held this position for four years.

As President, Peter delivered four lectures on the theme of ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century’ which were subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1998-2001) and are now available free to read until 31 October 2025.

Peter’s academic career was spent at King’s College London where he was appointed an Assistant Lecturer in 1959, rising to Professor in 1978 and becoming Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in 1980. Peter’s term as RHS President came after his retirement from King’s in 1993. Though officially retired, Peter remained closely involved with King’s, teaching courses into the 2010s.

Peter’s association with the Society also continued after his Presidency, not least with his very generous provision of the annual RHS Marshall Fellowships to support early career researchers to complete a doctorate in history. The latest recipients — for the academic year 2024-25 — have recently completed their Fellowships, held at the Institute of Historical Research. Peter took great interest in the work of each Fellow and many academic careers have been enhanced, and many professional friendships established, thanks to Peter’s creation of this programme.

Peter’s research field was British imperial history, with a specialism in eighteenth-century British India. His work appears in more than 50 articles and chapters and numerous books which range from The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965) to Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies (2019). His final monograph will appear posthumously.

Peter’s many other contributions to scholarship include his editorship of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (1975-81); membership of the editorial committee for the Correspondence of Edmund Burke (1965–78), for which he co-edited volume 2 (1968); as an associate editor for the Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (1976–2015), for which he edited four volumes; and editorship of the eighteenth-century volume of the Oxford History of the British Empire (1998).

Peter was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and appointed a CBE for services to history in 2002.

Peter was a friend to many and a very generous host to members of the Society’s Council who enjoyed summer lunches in his garden. He will be very greatly missed.

We hope to carry a fuller tribute, focusing on Peter’s contribution to the Royal Historical Society and his term as President, in due course.

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IMAGE: Peter Marshall with Jinty Nelson (1942-2024) who succeeded Peter as President of the Royal Historical Society in November 2000.

 

A new article, published in the Society’s journal, Transactions, celebrates the scholarship of ‘Jinty Nelson in Thirteen Articles’.

The collection, edited by Alice Rio (King’s College London), gathers thirteen contributions by historians, friends, colleagues and/or students of Jinty’s, who were asked to choose their favourite article by her for an event held in Jinty’s memory on 15 January 2025 at King’s College London.

The chosen articles, arranged in chronological order, range from her 1977 study ‘On the Limits of the Carolingian Renaissance’, published in Studies in Church History, to ‘Charlemagne and Ravenna’, in Ravenna: Its role in Earlier Medieval Change and Exchange, a chapter in a 2016 collection edited by Jinty and Judith Herrin.

Contributors to this article include: Alice Rio, Stuart Airlie, Kate Cooper, Wendy Davies, Paul Fouracre, David Ganz, John Gillingham, Peter Heather, Judith Herrin, Henrietta Leyser, Julia M. H. Smith, Rachel Stone, and Ian N. Wood.

As Alice Rio writes in her introduction:

We offer this collection in print now for a wider audience not so much because it has any claim to be exhaustive or authoritative, but because taken all together these pieces seemed to add up to a useful retrospective on Jinty’s work, its wider context, and its impact on the field over the decades. We hope that, for those who know her work well already, this may be an opportunity to remember some of her classic (and a few less classic) articles, while at the same time serving as an accessible introduction to her research for anyone who knew her without necessarily knowing about her field, as well as for a new and younger generation of readers.

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Dame Jinty Nelson FBA (1942-2024) was Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and President of the Royal Historical Society (2000-2004).

You can read more about Jinty’s contribution to scholarship, and to the Society, in this article, written by her friend, colleague and fellow RHS Council member, Pauline Stafford, published in October 2024.

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‘Jinty Nelson in Thirteen Articles’ is now available as an Open Access article in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. From August 2024, all content published in Transactions is available Open Access with no charge to the author.

The journal’s editors welcome submission of research articles covering all historical topics, chronologies and regions, and commentaries on aspects of historical debate and practice.

 

At its latest meeting on 2 July 2025, the RHS Council elected 78 Fellows, 49 Associate Fellows, 45 Members and 62 Postgraduate Members, a total of 234 people newly associated with the Society, from today.

The majority of the new Fellows hold academic appointments at universities, specialising in a wide range of fields; but also include curators, librarians, heritage specialists, independent researchers and writers. The Society is an international community of historians and our latest intake includes Fellows from eleven countries: Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The new Associate Fellows include not only early career historians in higher education but also historians with professional and private research interests drawn from heritage, learned societies, libraries and archives, teaching, and public and community history.

The new Members have a similarly wide range of historical interests, and include individuals working in universities, culture and heritage, education, the civil service and broadcasting – together with independent and community historians and genealogists.

Our new Postgraduate Members are studying for higher degrees in history, or related subjects, at 44 different universities in the UK, Canada, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States.

All those newly elected to the Fellowship and Membership bring a valuable range of expertise and experience to the Society.

New Fellows and Members are elected at regular intervals through the year. The current application round is open and runs to 11 August and 13 October 2025. Further details on RHS Fellowship and Membership categories (Fellow, Associate Fellow, Member and Postgraduate Member); benefits of membership; deadlines for applications; and how to apply, are available here.

New Fellows, elected July 2025

• Ben Anderson
• Katherine Aron-Beller
• Nicholas Baker-Brian
• Catherine Bates
• Samuel Beckton
• Saliha Belmessous
• Stacy Boldrick
• Stuart Brookes
• Robyne Calvert
• Steven Casey
• Richard Cassidy
• Song-Chuan Chen
• Margaret Coombe
• Esther Liberman Cuenca
• Antoine Destemberg
• Pragya Dhital
• John Fahey
• Andrew Fitzmaurice
• Isabelle Gapp
• Laura Gelfand
• Harrison Glancy
• Trevor Griffiths
• Aviva Guttmann
• Ewan Harrison
• Daniel Hill
• Peter Hodgkinson
• Michael Hooper
• Glenn Horridge
• Luke Houghton
• Christophe Huchet de Quénetain
• Alex Imrie
• Ben Jackson
• Marc Jaffre
• Michelle Johansen
• Geraldine Johnson
• David Katz
• Damien Kempf
• Sarah Kenny
• Daniel Langton
• Stefano Locatelli
• Matt Lodder
• Harriet Lyon
• Amy Matthewson
• Karen McAulay
• Claire McNulty
• Krista Milne
• Eloise Moss
• Olukoya Ogen
• Kathryn Olmsted
• Martin Pegler
• Helen Pfeifer
• Catherine (Katie) Pickles
• Helen Pierce
• Kerry Pimblott
• Oisín Plumb
• Peter Radford
• Dries Raeymaekers
• Eric Rauchway
• Anne Redgate
• Benedetta Rossi
• Alison Rowlands
• Raphael Schäfer
• Rachel Silberstein
• J.E. Smyth
• James Stafford
• Jeffrey Tatum
• Hillary Taylor
• Jennifer Tucker
• Steve Tuffnell
• Michelle Tusan
• Heidi Tworek
• Sarina Wakefield
• Stephen Walker
• Elise Watson
• David Wenkel
• Samuel White
• Kin Pan Wu
• Brandon Yen

New Associate Fellows, elected July 2025

• Abhimanyu Arni
• Susannah Bain
• Melody Bridges
• Alistair Cartwright
• Hiu Ki Chan
• Onor Crummay
• Christopher Davis
• Samantha Dobbie
• Razvan Dumitru
• Matthias Ebejer
• Ngozi Edeagu
• Shushun Gao
• Lorraine Grimes
• Christina Gundersen
• Courtney Herber
• Beth Hodgett
• Waliu Ismaila
• Zoë Jackson
• Anna Jamieson
• Pauline Jarvis
• Alexander Kelleher
• Debbie Kilroy
• Emily Lanman
• Ewan Lawry
• Gary Lawson
• Maroš Melichárek
• Henry Moore
• Safya Morshed
• Andrii Pastushenko
• Eóin Phillips
• Ellen Pilsworth
• Anna-Marie Pípalová
• Emily Price
• Liam Redfern
• Michelle Reynolds
• Beckie Rutherford
• Aruni Samarakoon
• Harry Sanderson
• Kathryn Steenson
• Guan Kiong Teh
• Natasa Thoudam
• Jonathan Tickle
• Reynold Kai Won Tsang
• Sylvia Valentine
• Diane Watts
• Sam Wilkinson
• Elena Yi-Jia Zeng
• Shuai Zhang
• Tom Zille

New Members, elected July 2025

• Sergey Alexandrov
• Hannah Bardsley
• Victoria Bentata Azaz
• Ryan Born
• Claire Clarke
• Nicola Clarke
• Barry County
• Katie David
• Caroline Dillon
• Patrick Gallagher
• Ellis Grayson
• Stephen Harper
• Jill Harrison
• Timothy Harte
• Harriet Hendley Jones
• LeSabre Hubbard
• Nicholas Hughes-Browne
• John Jones
• Swaminathan Kannan
• Habeeb Liasu
• Sakshi Mavi
• Daryl Mears
• Jim Metcalfe
• Anna Montell Magnusson
• Zak Mudie
• Saradindu Mukherjee
• James Ndua
• Angela OConnor
• Caroline Offord
• Christoph Pelanek
• Snizhanna Petrova
• Jennifer Phillips
• Lukas Pohle
• Mithra Iyengar Ramprabu
• Vishak Ratheesh Nair
• Paolo Ronchi
• Huw Rowlands
• Adam Royle
• Maria Saltrese
• Olga Sieluzycka
• Michael Wasserman
• Anthony Wentworth
• Rowan Whitcomb
• Theron Williams
• Mark Wilson

New Postgraduate Members, elected July 2025

• Luke Adams
• Zamdar Ahmad
• Benjamin Ansley
• Mary Banks
• Paul Barrett
• Alexander Birt
• Tom Black
• Amber Bourke
• Conor Brockbank
• Amy Maria Butler
• Marco Büttner
• Emily Cadger
• Thomas Casemore
• Ben Cassell
• Bidisha Chutia
• Melis  Doeh
• Lisa Dyer
• Evelyn Earl
• Matthew Eaton
• Ali Erginsoy
• Madeleine Fontenay
• Elizabeth Gilkey
• Soumyadeep Guha
• Maeve Hagerty
• Kevin Harris
• Carter Henley
• Anna Hill
• Aaron Hoggle
• Amy Hopkins
• Boyang Hou
• Po Chun Hsu
• Roseanne Hurst
• Iacovos Iacovides
• Evrydiki Ioannidou
• Thomas Keegan-Hobbs
• Ronan Kennedy
• Ayuk Lawrence Asam
• Sayan Lodh
• Ashe Loyd
• Chris Maloney
• Lynn Marriott
• Henriette Marsden
• Jennifer McFarland
• Jonathan Moore
• Simon Mortimer
• Clare O’Neill
• James Orchin
• Loan Peuch
• Clive Porro
• Mathis Prevost
• Pili Rigam
• Shadi Seifouri
• Nitika Sharma
• Carly Silvers
• Charmaine Simpson
• Nur’Ain Taha
• Adebukola Taiwo
• Amy Thorpe
• Rogan Vlahakis
• Lewis Willcox
• Klaudia Wroblewska
• Haohao Zhang

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HEADER IMAGE: Album of Tournaments and Parades in Nuremberg, German, Nuremberg, late 16th–mid-17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, public domain.

 

The Society currently invites applications for the following three schemes — open to historians across a range of career stages and backgrounds — with a closing date of 5 September 2025. For further information on each programme, eligibility and how to apply please follow the links below.

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Closing dates in September 2025

• Martin Lynn Scholarship in African History providing a grant of £1,500 to support postgraduate research for a PhD in African history. The Scholarship is open Postgraduate Members of the Royal Historical Society, currently studying for a PhD. Next closing date: Friday 5 September.
• Early Career Fellowship Grants provide funding of £2,000, maximum, for discrete research projects lasting no more than six months. Grants are open to early career historians within five years of submission of their doctoral thesis. Applicants must also be members of the Royal Historical Society. Next closing date: Friday 5 September.
• Open Research Support Grants provide funding of either £500 or £1000 to historians to undertake historical research. Activities include visiting archives and historical sites, and travel to academic conferences. These grants are available to members of the Royal Historical Society who are not postgraduate students or early career researchers (within 5 years of completing a PhD). Next closing date: Friday 5 September.

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Applicants for these Royal Historical Society grants must be members of the Society. To find out how to become a Fellow, Associate Fellow, Member or Postgraduate Member, please see our Join Us page.

Details of current holders of Royal Historical Society Fellowships and Grants are available here.

All enquiries about Research Funding should be sent to the Society’s Membership and Grants Officer at: membership@royalhistsoc.org.

HEADER IMAGE: Bowl with a scholar, anon, c.1575-99, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, public domain.

 

Video and audio recordings of the Society’s 2025 Prothero Lecture, with Professor Peter Gatrell FBA, are now available. This year’s lecture — ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’ — took place on 2 July, in person and online.

Watch the video of the lecture

Listen to the lecture

 

 

Peter’s lecture drew on his recent research in the archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. The archive contains the letters and petitions that refugees sent to the UNHCR in the post-1945 era, and provides the historian with rare insights of how refugees presented their situation and the responses they received. The numerous case files preserved by the UNHCR disclose the hopes, aspirations and rights claims of displaced people from many different parts of the world, whether or not they were recognised under international refugee law.

Peter Gatrell FBA is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include: The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (2019) and the co-authored Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom (2025), which draws on the rich resources of the UNHCR archives to present the personal experiences of mass displacement.

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Forthcoming public lectures with the Royal Historical Society

The Society’s lecture programme continues in September / October with the following three events:

• Friday 12 September 2025: Professor Yasmin Khan (Oxford), ‘Mars and Britannia: the British Imperial Way of Warfare’ (Mary Ward House, London and online)
• Wednesday 17 September 2025: Professor Matthew J. Smith (UCL), ‘Twice Removed: Slavery, Big Data, and the Cultures of Caribbean Ancestral Histories’, part of the Society’s visit to historians at the University of Aberdeen
• Wednesday 22 October 2025: Professor Tim Grady (Chester), ‘Unravelling the Tapestry of Death: Britain and the Memory of the Two World Wars’, part of the Society’s visit to historians at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich

Further details of each of these lectures will be released shortly.

 

The Royal Historical Society is very pleased to announce the winners of its 2025 prizes, for early career articles and first books written by early career historians. This year’s winners were announced at the Society’s annual Prothero Lecture which took place on 2 July and was attended by all four of this year’s recipients.

The two winners for each category are as follows:

Early Career Article Prize

• William Jones, “You are going to be my Bettman”: Exploitative Sexual Relationships and the Lives of the Pipels in Nazi Concentration Camps’, published in The Journal of Holocaust Research (2024)
• Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, published in History Workshop Journal (2024)

The Society’s Early Career Article Prize is awarded for an article published in 2024 by an early career historian who is either studying for a doctorate or is within three years of completing a PhD at a university in the UK or Republic of Ireland. Both winners receive a prize of £250.

First Book Prize

• Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948, by Jules Skotnes-Brown (Johns Hopkins University Press 2024)

The Society’s First Book Prize is awarded for a first history monograph, published in 2024, written by a PhD graduate of a university in the UK or Republic of Ireland. Both winners receive a prize of £1,000.

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This year’s prizes invited eligible authors to submit an article or monograph for consideration. More than 65 titles were submitted for each category.

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In their citation for Michaela Kalcher’s article, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine’, this year’s judges praised:

A beautifully written, psychologically rich analysis of trauma, identity, and diary writing. Combining microhistory with theoretical depth, this compelling article will likely become a key part of the historiography of the French Revolution on account of its provocations and highly intelligent construction.

Commenting on William Jones’s article, ‘“You are going to be my Bettman”’, the judges commended:

A groundbreaking and sensitive study of sexual violence during the Holocaust. This is an article that balances theoretical nuance with survivor testimony, offering a new conceptual framework that is both meaningful and analytically sharp. In the extensive historiography of the Holocaust, William Jones has something new and important to say.

In their citation for Laura Flannigan’s monograph, Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, the judges congratulated:

An impressive, conceptually adept and ambitiously argued book. This is a study grounded in extraordinarily deep archival research on a previously neglected judicial court that was established in the late fifteenth century. The rich quantitative data yields intriguing vignettes that give wonderful colour to institutional history. Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth is clearly written and structured, as well as being cleverly and convincingly argued.

In their citation for Jules Skotnes-Brown’s book, Segregated Species, the panel praised: 

A fascinating, original, highly engaging, conceptually smart and extremely well-written interdisciplinary study that combines the history of science with its much wider social, political and racial context. This rich book is impressively researched, nimble in its analysis, successfully experimental at times in its approach and superbly written.

Full citations for our two early career article prizes are available here; those for the winners of this year’s book prize are available here.

Our congratulations to the four winners in 2025, and the twelve additional authors whose work was shortlisted for this year’s early career article and first book prizes.

 

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IMAGE: left to right: William Ross Jones, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Laura Flannigan, Lucy Noakes (President of the Royal Historical Society), and Michaela Kalcher, 2 July 2025