Applications to the REF 2029 History Sub-panel close at midday on 28th April. See link below for more information:
https://2029.ref.ac.uk/panels/ref-2029-main-and-sub-panel-recruitment/
See our guide to ‘Becoming a Member of the History Subject Panel for REF2029’:
The Society’s President, Professor Lucy Noakes, writes this week for History Workshop.
In her article — ‘Making the Case for History. A View from the Royal Historical Society’ — Lucy considers the implications of cuts on the provision of history teaching and research, and how we advocate for our discipline and profession. Headlines from the article include:
Earlier this month, Lucy also spoke to BBC History Online about the current state of history in UK higher education, the impact of cuts, and harnessing the wider popularity of history in national culture.
You can also read more in the Society’s latest briefing, ‘The Value of History in UK Higher Education and Society’ (October 2024), which includes downloadable charts, tables and slides on the professional opportunities afforded by a history degree.
Header image, and all images in the article, commissioned from Eanna Swan by History Workshop.
The latest episode of the BBC History Extra podcast features an interview with the Society’s President, Lucy Noakes.
In a special episode on the current state of history in UK higher education, Lucy speaks to Matt Elton both about the negative impact of cuts and closures on the provision of history research and teaching, and the wider popularity of history in national culture.
Lucy’s interview considers the Society’s work to support the profession; how we demonstrate the contributions of university and other historians to public history; and her ambitions for the Society as an advocate for historical practice and practitioners.
Lucy’s interview begins at 6:40 in this episode of the podcast, which was released on 1 April 2025.
On 7 March, the Royal Historical Society held an information event to consider the role and workload of the REF2029 History sub-panel, and how historians interested in submitting for the our disciplinary sub-panel should proceed with an application.
The work of disciplinary sub-panels (including that for History) is fundamental to the Research Excellence Framework. Subject panels form the heart of REF, responsible for assessing and grading scholarly outputs, impact and research cultures across the UK HE sector.
The steering group of REF2029 currently invites applications to join the sub-panels that will set the criteria and then assess submissions for the next research exercise.
The Society has now published a post — ‘Becoming a Member of the History Subject Panel for REF2029’ — which addresses the topic with reference to three areas:
This article summarises a discussion between former History sub-panel members and prospective panellists for 2029. Our speakers’ comments made clear the rewards of panel membership as well as the extent and burden of the work, and the need for applicants to have secured an agreement with their home institutions to manage a workload that is incompatible, at least in late 2028 and 2029, with full-time academic duties.
The event made clear the need to share information with potential applicants to provide a rounded picture (negative as well as positive) of the History sub-panel and panel membership: its purpose and phases of work; the skills and mindset required of members; the breadth of subjects to which members are introduced; and the very considerable time commitment expected of panellists.
Our event further confirmed the Society’s concern—first set out last month—that Research England’s new approach to recruitment currently cannot guarantee us the final sub-panel composition our discipline requires. Nor does it appreciate the sense of crisis, reduced opportunity and growing inequality, within humanities in UK higher education, that will prevent many aspirant panellists from proceeding with an application.
The deadline for applications for History panel membership is noon 28 April 2025. We hope this guide enables applicants to make an informed decision about their ability to undertake this role before completing an application. Applicants should expect to hear outcomes by July with first meetings of the panel taking place shortly after.
The Society currently invites applications for the following five schemes — open to historians across a range of career stages — with closing dates of Friday 23 May and Friday 5 September 2025. For further information on each programme, eligibility and how to apply please follow the links below.
Two new programmes are available with support from the Scouloudi Foundation. Both schemes seek to support historians working collaboratively across a range of sectors, including higher education, museums and galleries and public history
IMAGES: iStock graphic designs, Credit: Olena Zagoruyko; Bowl with a scholar, anon, c.1575-99, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, public domain.
Registration is now open for the next lecture in the Royal Historical Society’s 2025 programme. On Friday 2 May, we welcome Professor Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton) to speak on ‘Remembering Rebellion in the Tudor South West’.
This event is open to all with booking now available for in-person attendance (Mary Ward House, London) and online. Please use one of these links to register for a place.
In this lecture, Mark Stoyle explores how those in the English South-West looked back on two major risings which broke out against Henry VII in Cornwall in 1497; the short-lived revolt against Edward VI’s religious changes in West Cornwall in 1548; the full-blooded protest against those same changes which convulsed Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and, finally, the abortive attempt to stir up a rebellion in Devon against Mary I’s impending marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554.
Mark’s lecture studies both elite and popular memories of the rebellions which occurred in the Tudor South West and will argue that those memories proved surprisingly long-lived.
More particularly, it will argue that the Western Rising of 1549 — ‘the Commotion Time’, as that protest was termed by contemporaries, ‘the Prayer Book Rebellion’ as it is popularly known today — was remembered by local people as a key caesura in the region’s history, and that it remained a live issue in West Country society right up until the eve of the English Civil War.
Mark Stoyle is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton and has particular research interests in the British crisis of the 1640s; in witchcraft; in urban society; and in Tudor rebellions. Mark has written many monographs and scholarly articles and his most recent book — The Western Rising of 1549 –– was published in paperback by Yale University Press in 2024.
Video and audio recordings are available for many of the Society’s events, including our lectures. The RHS Events Archive includes recent lectures by, among others, Lucy Noakes, Natasha Hodgson, Janina Ramirez, Julia Laite, Tom Holland, Brenda Stephenson, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Levi Roach.
On 5 March 2025, the Royal Historical Society will co-host the this year’s History and Archives in Practice day conference (HAP25), jointly organised with our partners The National Archives and Institute of Historical Research. HAP is an opportunity for historians and archivists to come together to discuss current projects and the intersection between historical and archival practice.
This year’s event takes the theme of ‘Working with Memory: History, Storytelling and Practices of Remembrance’ and brings together 28 presentations from historians and archivists. The programme for this year’s event, which is fully booked, is now available.
This year’s History and Archives in Practice takes place at Senate House, University of London. In alternate years, HAP is held in association with a fourth UK partner institution and details of the partner and, following an open call, the location for HAP26 will be announced on 5 March.
The following is a joint statement from the Historical Association, History UK, Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society following the most recent meeting of this quartet of organisations.
It’s been an especially grim start to 2025 for many in UK higher education. News in early January of cuts and job losses at the universities of Canterbury Christ Church, Northampton and Staffordshire has been followed by announcements from Cardiff, Durham, Newcastle, Reading, Sheffield, and, once again, Kent. This, moreover, is only a selection of the institutions currently pursuing cuts to staffing, reductions in course provision, restructures and mergers.
While few subject areas are immune to what is now a full-blown financial crisis in UK higher education, the arts and humanities continue to bear the brunt. This includes history which is the discipline represented, in schools and universities, by our four organisations: the Historical Association, History UK, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society.
The problems facing education far exceed the capacity of any single subject association. On the ground, case-by-case, each of us provides support and speaks for our distinctive memberships and constituencies, through targeted research and campaigns. But it’s also the case that the concerns and priorities on which we focus, individually, are shared by this quartet of historical organisations.
When we meet together—or with organisations including the British Academy and Arts and Humanities Alliance, which pursue similar agenda—our work highlights common areas for attention. These include the ‘pipeline’ between school and university, and why some students are being turned away from history; a loss of support for history teacher training in UK universities; and the need to articulate more forcefully and clearly the skills—professional, personal and civic—inherent to the study of history. Here, we work to connect with communities, from students and parents to teachers and politicians, who are sometimes unaware of or resistant to these positives.
Despite history’s immense popularity at large—evident in the public appetite for historic sites, podcasts, film or television, and private research—the health and vitality of our subject in schools and universities cannot be taken for granted. While history remains attractive at GCSE, A-Level and Scottish Highers, in higher education in particular it is under growing pressure. In addition to the challenges posed by an over-marketised, increasingly broken HE infrastructure, history is increasingly vulnerable to uninformed comment about its value compared with other areas of study.
Here our four organisations have common cause.
While engagement with our particular constituencies continues, we’re also working closely and strategically for history across and beyond education. These activities include the sharing of information, to understand the changing environment in which history is studied, taught and practised; identifying and communicating the value of history education; demonstrating the diversity of a subject which is now as likely to involve big data analysis as it is a visit to an archive; and working to close the gap between ‘popular history’ and the specialist teaching and research on which this depends.
In these ways, we seek a more co-ordinated approach to advocacy, so that we might better campaign and speak up for history. Collaboration, between historians, and with fellow humanities organisations, has never been more necessary. If you wish to help us, please get in touch.
Claire Langhamer, Director of the Institute of Historical Research
Lucy Noakes, President of the Royal Historical Society
Antonio Sennis and Sarah Holland, Co-chairs of History UK
Alexandra Walsham and Rebecca Sullivan, President and CEO of the Historical Association
At its latest meeting on 7 February 2025, the RHS Council elected 47 Fellows, 35 Associate Fellows, 49 Members and 86 Postgraduate Members, a total of 215 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 nine countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Malta, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, 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 45 different universities in the UK, Australia, Canada, China, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Taiwan, 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 24 March 2025 with the next deadline being 26 May 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.
HEADER IMAGE: Drury Lane Theatre, Various artists / makers, 1808; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain
We are very grateful to Dr Natasha Hodgson for her Royal Historical Society lecture delivered on Friday 7 February. In her lecture — ‘Dangerous Journeys: Framing Women’s Movement in the Medieval World’ — Natasha demonstrated the expanding patterns of women’s movement and migration, as governed by subsistence crises, the growth of urban centres, and a search for new trade routes as well as lands to settle.
The journeys made by medieval women are at odds with prevailing accounts of restrictions on women’s power and movement. Those who were able to transcend these barriers are typically considered ‘exceptional’. In her lecture, Natasha questioned the value and accuracy of exceptionality as a category of analysis for those women who left their homes and travelled, whether temporarily or to migrate, and who undertook the ‘dangerous journeys’ of pilgrimage and crusade central to this paper.
In making these journeys, many women faced criticism, or at the very least concerns about the dangers posed to their personal and spiritual safety. However, this did not prevent a substantial number of women from all social classes moving around the medieval world.
Natasha’s lecture also drew on her work in schools history, as co-founder of teachingmedievalwomen.org—a collaborative initiative to expand and revitalise the teaching of women’s history in medieval studies. New research on and understanding of women’s lives is yet to appear in the teaching or assessment of medieval history in schools. As Natasha argued, exploring ‘dangerous journeys’ provides one means to bring the vibrancy and nuance of historical research to the classroom.
Dr Natasha Hodgson is an Associate Professor in History and Director of the Centre for Research in History, Heritage and Memory Studies (CRHHMS) at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.
Recording are available for many of our events, including lectures, panel discussions and workshops on professional practice and development. The RHS Events Archive includes recent lectures by, among others, Janina Ramirez, Julia Laite, Tom Holland, Brenda Stephenson, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Greg Jenner, and guides to History and Gen AI, writing a first monograph, and history podcasting.