We are delighted to make publicly available a podcast of Dr Sujit Sivasundaram’s Prothero Lecture for 2019, which he gave to a packed audience at the Royal Historical Society on Friday 5 July.
You can now listen to “Waves Across the South: Monarchs, Travellers and Empire in the Pacific” in full, accompanied by Dr Sivasundaram’s presentation slides, here.
On Friday 5 July, the Royal Historical Society welcomed a full lecture theatre to hear Dr Sujit Sivasundaram give the 2019 Prothero Lecture, entitled “Waves Across the South: Monarchs, Travellers and Empire in the Pacific”.
At a Reception following the Lecture, the President and Officers of the Royal Historical Society were delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 RHS Publication, Fellowship and Teaching Awards, and to welcome new Fellows and Members to the Society.
The full lists of award winners, new Fellows and Members admitted to the Society are:
Awarded to: Ryan Hanley for a volume Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 (Cambridge University Press: 2018).
Judges’ citation: This year’s submissions for the Whitfield Award featured rigorous and innovative works of historical research, many of which will endure among classic studies in their fields. That said, Ryan Hanley’s superb study, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830, stands apart for its audacious engagement with debates on the cultural positioning of black participants in British literary, political, and intellectual culture during a transitional period in British domestic and imperial history. Hanley’s rich and lively examination shows that black authors engaged in a comprehensive range of topics, from legal debates, the nature of celebrity, religious controversy, spiritual memoir, radical politics, to epistemology – extending far beyond the abolitionist paradigm that historians have long assumed and thus have tended to impose. Like their fellow intellectuals, black authors disagreed with each other, they led debate, cultivated their style, and courted new readers. We have Hanley to thank for drawing renewed attention to these voices, and for showing us why these authors mattered then and matter now.
Awarded to: Duncan Hardy for a volume Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346-1521 (Oxford University Press: 2018).
Judges’ citation: This is an outstanding first book and it deserves the highest of praise. Hardy builds an ambitious and convincing thesis about the structure and workings of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period, arguing that it is best understood in terms of various forms of political association. This is a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the period and region. It encourages scholars to consider sixteenth-century Germany not only through the lens of the Reformation but in terms of underlying late-medieval political structures and practices. The writing is clear and precise throughout, and the author reveals a deep knowledge of the archival sources. The organisation of the book allows its argument to build steadily, and the high quality of the writing and analysis is sustained from start to finish (it also has a gorgeous front cover). Associative political culture fills a gap in the existing literature and deserves to be very widely read.
Awarded to: Jake Richards for an article ‘Anti-Slave-Trade Law, “Liberated Africans” and the State in the South Atlantic World, c. 1839-1852’, Past and Present, 241 (2018), 170-219.
Judges’ citation: This rich and thoughtful article follows the experiences of ‘liberated Africans’ after the formal abolition of the slave trade, as the seizure of ‘prize negroes’ from slave ships opened a complicated chapter in the establishment of their rights and status. Based on detailed and wide-ranging research, tracking histories between Britain, South Africa and Brazil, the article reaches beyond existing debates to consider the experience of those who were liberated by the anti-slave patrols in the Atlantic ocean: the ways in which they understood and negotiated a way through the legal processes that faced them, and their claims to what Richards refers to as ‘unguaranteed entitlements’ in their transition from enslavement. Achieving a satisfying balance between specific cases and more general reflections, the article makes an important contribution to research, offering fresh ways of thinking about the topic and exploring the fascinating context of the port cities of Salvador da Bahia and Cape Town as testing grounds for the impact of abolition and the future prospects of the ‘liberated Africans’.
Proxime accesit: Stephanie Wright for an article ‘Glorious Brothers, Unsuitable Lovers: Moroccan Veterans, Spanish Women, and the Mechanisms of Francoist Paternalism’, Journal of Contemporary History (2018), 1-23.
Judges’ citation: With a rich base in archival work, this article explores the position of Moroccan military veterans in Spanish policy under Franco. Wright demonstrates that certain categories of disabled Moroccan veterans actually received higher levels of state support than their Spanish counterparts, but that this reflected attitudes towards them shaped by paternalism and distinctive understandings of their masculinity. Ideas about race and gender also contributed to anxieties about relationships between Moroccans and Spaniards in the period after the Civil War, which Spanish bureaucrats even tried to sabotage on occasion. Wright argues that the treatment of Moroccan veterans can be read as part of Francoist heightening of the status of Spanish masculinity, and also as a part of its management of the Moroccan protectorate. The article is well written and grounded in detailed research, offering an original and well-articulated contribution to scholarship on modern Spain, gender, race and disability.
Awarded to: Philip Loft for an article ‘Litigation, the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the House of Lords as the High Court, 1660-1875’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 943-967.
Judges’ citation: The judges thought that this was a very accomplished treatment of an ambitious topic, marked by a maturity of approach. It deftly analyses a substantial source base to advance new arguments about not only eighteenth-century legal history but, above all, the nature of the composite British state after the Union of 1707. The article investigates Scottish cases brought before parliament, as part of a wider body of 8,500 appeals over the period, a sample of which is analysed here. The analysis demonstrates that the number of Scottish appeals grew after 1745, and that from the 1760s Scots increasingly lobbied for legislation to promote their fisheries and linen industries. Appeals were often used as a way of forcing compromise on parties that ensured that Westminster affected only the localities and individuals involved in a case. The author convincingly argues that local interests co-opted the state in defence of their interests, thereby keeping their autonomy, as often in England too, and also briefly draws comparisons with appellate courts elsewhere in Europe, notably Castile.
Awarded to: Robert Fitt for a dissertation ‘Texan textbooks: Cranks, Conservatives and the Contest for America in High School History, 1976-1986’.
Judges’ citation: This piece is beautifully written, and the prose shows real verve. In a well-argued way, it makes a significant historiographical intervention based upon the analysis activism around school textbooks. This allows the author to argue for a more germinal understanding of ideology, looking at the ways in which cultural shift occurs and redefining the scope of peripheral actors to influence that shift. There is a strong archival source base and the argument is strongly supported throughout. The dissertation features interesting discussions around the use of history, and the ways in which the shaping of narratives can influence conceptions of political norms and shape broader consensus. At times, I felt there could have been a little more agency shown for those who read the textbooks, though the focus was clearly on the authors and activists who altered the text. This was outstanding work and a real pleasure to read
Proxime accesit: Leanne Smith for a dissertation ‘“In the Revolution of Times, the Changes will run their round out, and then the Lord will come to Reign” John Rogers: A Fifth Monarchy Man’s Commonwealth of Saints’.
Judges’ citation: This was a very strong and meticulously detailed intervention into debates around republicanism in early-modern England. The dissertation shows an excellent command of the historiography and seeks to offer a more nuanced understanding of how religious thoughts influenced and intertwined with discussions of radical political change. Through close engagement with Rogers’ output, the dissertation explores the reflexive influence of millenarian beliefs on the febrile political climate of the seventeenth century and also the lingering influence of classical political philosophy.
Awarded to: Professor Julia Crick (King’s College London)
Judges’ citation: Professor Julia Crick receives the Jinty Nelson Award in recognition of her superlative contribution to the teaching and mentoring of younger generations of historians. Palaeography is challenging but integral to the subject of history. It underpins so much else in the field, and manuscripts in particular are windows onto much that would otherwise be inaccessible. Professor Crick has spent a life time advocating the importance of Palaeography to the global academic community and has demonstrated this specifically through her teaching and mentoring. Throughout her career (including appointments at the universities of Cambridge and Exeter, and in her current position at King’s College London), Professor Crick has been a wonderful teacher, not just of Palaeography, but also in training students of any level to think critically, to ask questions, and to build historical arguments based on visual and physical evidence. Professor Crick’s classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels bring history and palaeography to life and she mentors research students in the same way, whether they are at King’s or elsewhere, in History or in another discipline. Crick treats her students more like peers than pupils, which creates a sense that the work can be valued and taken seriously even from a very early stage. Crick’s commitment to the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation is especially evident in her establishment of networks and events that highlight postgraduate research. She has frequently organised seminars, symposia and conferences which include equal space for early career researchers. Over the course of her career, Professor Crick has demonstrated a wide-ranging and sustained commitment to inspiring and training new generations of historians to excel.
Awarded to: Dr Sharon Webb and Dr James Baker (University of Sussex)
Judges’ citation: Over the last four years Drs Webb and Baker have delivered a series of first-year digital history workshop/lectures taken by all undergraduates at the University of Sussex in either History or Art History. These radically update the notion of the ‘historian’s craft’ to include the skills and practices required to engage critically with online sources (both inherited and born digital). The programme is a unique response to the challenges posed by the changes in historical research and debate, designed to turn history undergraduates into digitally savvy, expert navigators of this new landscape of knowledge. What sets the series apart is the self-conscious way in which it seeks to intervene in the history curriculum more generally. By building a skills/apprenticeship model into first-year teaching, it lays the foundations for the development of advanced approaches in the second and third year. The guiding narrative is to move gradually from ‘Doing History in the Digital Age’ to ‘Doing Digital History’ – taking students from referencing, search, and using online databases to compiling datasets, digitisation, and making data visualisations. It is this accumulation of skills, and layering of multiple approaches, that creates a comprehensive and sophisticated understanding. Second-year students move on to modules on the analysis of historical networks and the technologies of print, and then in the third year to a co-taught module on digital archiving. These same skills are also re-enforced in teaching by colleagues across the degree. The first full cohort of students introduced to these skills in their first year have now graduated. Standards of research and practice have improved across the board.
RHS Marshall Fellowship 2019Awarded to: Purba Hossain (University of Leeds)
For research on: ‘Situating the Coolie Question: Indentured Labour and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’
Awarded to: Jack Newman (University of Kent)
For research on: ‘Corruption, Entropy and Conflict: Institutional Adaptation in Pre-Black Death England c.1307-1348’
Awarded to Helen Esfandiary (King’s College London) for her paper, given at the Life Cycles seminar, on Maternal Obligations and Knowledge of Smallpox Inoculation in Eighteenth-Century Elite Society.
The Pollard Prize is awarded annually by the Institute of Historicla Research for the best paper presented at an Institute of Historical Research seminar by a postgraduate student or by a researcher within one year of completing the PhD.
Awarded to Sarah Johanesen (King’s College London) for her essay ‘That silken Priest: Catholic disguise and anti-popery on the English Mission (1569-1640)’.
The Neale Prize is awarded annually by the Institute of Historical Research to a historian in the early stages of their career for an essay of up to 8,000 words on a theme related to the history of early modern Britain.
Kristine Alexander
Paul Ayris
Marco Barducci
Joshua Bennett
Zoltan Biedermann
Gilly Carr
Megan Cassidy-Welch
Hannah Cornwell
Pamela Cox
Katherine Cross
Tom Cutterham
Giuseppe De Luca
Bruno De Nicola
Donald Dickson
Catherine Flinn
Stella Ghervas
Helen Glew
Tim Grady
Jane Hamlett
Christopher Hill
Andrew Hobbs
Mike Horswell
Robert Johnson
Emily Jones
Marjo Kaartinen
Barbara Keys
Samia Khatun
Dip Chi Kon Lai
Katell Laveant
Daryl Leeworthy
Marcella Lorenzini
Andrew Macdonald
Kirsteen Mackenzie
Susan Major
George K W Mak
Erik Mathisen
Alexander Mcauley
Christopher McCreery
Joseph Moretz
Rachel Moss
John Newman
Joanna Norman
Onyeka Nubia
Daphna Oren-Magidor
Matthew Parker
Sarah Pedersen
Sarah Peverley
Kavita Puri
Sara Read
Matthias Reiss
Anna Ross
Tobias Rupprecht
Raffaella Santi
Otto Saumarez-Smith
Elizabeth Savage
Uditi Sen
Caroline Sharples
Jane Shaw
Malcolm Shifrin
Gajendra Singh
Jonathan Smyth
Malcolm Spencer
Charles Tieszen
Dora Vargha
Geraldine Vaughan
Jan Vermeiren
Matthew Walker
Neil Younger
David Zersen
Ann-Marie Akehurst
Darinee Alagirisamy
Rosamaria Alibrandi
Gordon Barrett
Nicholas Blake
Natalie Butler
Chun Kei Chow
Sajed Chowdury
Juliana Coulton
Michael Davies
Steven Dieter
Misha Ewen
Boris Gorshkov
Amanda Harvey
Stephanie Howard-Smith
Omer Khan
Christopher Fear
David Lees
Judith Loades
Mihaela Martin
Emma McCauley-Tinniswood
Barbara Mellor
Erin Moody
Eric Morier-Genoud
Hannah-Rose Murray
Carole O’Reilly
Hannah Parker
Peter Pincemin-Johnstone
Meredith Riedel
Ilaria Scaglia
Alexander Scott
Gregory Slysz
Chrissie Twigg
Joseph Viscomi
Marilla Walker
James Wearn
Katherine Wilson
Andrew Winrow
Hardy Acosta-Cuellar
Maria Bastiao
Lacey Bonar
Sarah Boote-Powell
Gregory Buchanan
Patcharaviral Charoenpacharaporn
Jennifer Chochinov
John Cooney
Sonia Cuesta-Maniar
Stephen Dickens
Koma Donworth
Olivia Durand
Jack Edmunds
Tzilla Eshel
James Fortuna
John Freeman
Christophe Gillian
Beth Griffiths
Hugh Hanley
Ben Hodges
Yijie Huang
Soundararajan Jagdish
Pheeraphone Jampee
Cosmin Koszor
Nicholas Leah
Sundeep Lidher
Vanessa Lim
Andrea Mancini
Mario Maritan
Shaun McGuiness
Daniel McKay
Brandon Munda
Jack Newman
Thom Pritchard
Xiaoping Qi
Roseanna Ramsden
Claire Rioult
Jayne Shaw
Johanna Sinclair
Stuart Smedley
Stuart Smith
Therese Sunga
Travis Weinger
Shamara Wettimuny
Amanda Williams
Tom Zago
The Royal Historical Society today launches its LGBT+ Survey 2019. The survey continues the Society’s very successful reports on Gender and on Race, Ethnicity and Equality; now the Working Group on LGBT+ Histories and Historians aims to find out more about the research, teaching and dissemination of LGBT+ histories, as well as the experience of LGBT+ historians.
We encourage all historians to complete the survey, which can be accessed directly here.
If you would like to publicise the Survey at an event, or within your department, you can download a poster and/or Powerpoint slide here.
The RHS values the diversity of the historical community in all its forms and over the past several years has invested serious resources in projects that promote equality and inclusion. We believe that valuing diversity means listening to the voices, and respecting the experiences, of people whose lives and identities may be different to our own. This includes trans and non-binary people.
In advance of the release of our latest survey, which will explore the research, teaching and dissemination of LGBT+ histories, as well as the experience of LGBT+ historians, read the full update from our LGBT+ Working Group on the Historical Transactions blog here.
The Social History Society, Economic History Society and History UK have launched a new funding scheme to support Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) history.
The BME Events and Activities Small Grants Scheme will provide grants of up to £750 to support activities and events run by BME historians or on subjects relating to BME history. An initial call for applications for funding is now open until 1 September 2019. The new funding addresses issues detailed in the Royal Historical Society’s report on Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History (2018) which drew attention to under-representation, structural inequalities and racism in the UK higher education system.
Full details of the BME funding scheme are available here: http://socialhistory.org.uk/bme-events-and-activities/.
A panel of experts, comprised of Professor Catherine Hall (University College London), Dr Meleisa Ono-George (University of Warwick) and Dr Jonathan Saha (University of Leeds), will assess the applications.
Professor Margot Finn, RHS President commented:
The announcement of this new tranche of dedicated funding for black and minority ethnic (BME) histories and historians is especially timely. The past several months have seen a wide range of historians engage with the structural and intellectual problems associated with BME under-representation in History in the UK. This positive development has increased the demand for funding to support BME historians whose expertise is vital to informed discussions on equality, diversity and inclusion in our discipline, and (more broadly) for new sources of funding to support workshops and other events that challenge conventional assumptions and practices. We hope that organisers of such events will also make good use of the funding available from the Royal Historical Society.
In response to updated guidance from cOAlition S on Plan S, the Royal Historical Society has provided History researchers, editors and learned societies with some essential information on the revised criteria. Read our analysis on the RHS blog here:
Find out more about our policy work in relation to the future of academic publishing and open access in general here.
The President and Officers of the Royal Historical Society are pleased to announce the election of Professor Jon Stobart, Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University as the Society’s new Honorary Treasurer.
Professor Stobart has held academic positions at the University of Northampton, Coventry University and Staffordshire University. He is a social and economic historian of eighteenth-century England, with particular interests in the histories of retailing and consumption. Much of Professor Stobart’s work is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international and he has worked with geographers, art historians, heritage professionals and historians from the UK and across Europe. His most recent book, Consumption and the Country House was published by OUP in 2016. Professor Stobart is a founding editor of the journal History of Retailing and Consumption, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and has sat on a number of academic councils and committees including the Economic History Society, Social History Society and Northamptonshire Record Society.
Professor Stobart takes on the role of Honorary Treasurer from Professor Sarah Hamilton (University of Exeter) who has served in that role since December 2014. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Hamilton for her important contribution to the Society in this position.
The President and Officers of the Royal Historical Society are pleased to announce the election of Professor Olivette Otele, Professor of History at Bath Spa University, as a Vice-President.
Professor Otele gained her PhD from Université La Sorbonne in 2005, and has held academic posts at Université Paris XIII, Institut Catholique de Paris, and University of Hull. She is a specialist in European colonial and post-colonial history, particularly the link between history, collective memory and geopolitics in relation to British and French colonial pasts. Otele has written widely for academic and broader audiences. Her forthcoming book, African Europeans: An Untold History, examines the long history of Europeans of African descent, and will be published by Hurst in December 2019.
She serves on the board of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as a committee member for the Society for the Study of French History, and for the V&A Museum’s research committee. In 2018, Professor Otele became the first Black woman to be appointed Professor of History in the United Kingdom.
A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2014, Professor Otele has already made a substantial contribution to the work of the Society as a member of both the Race, Ethnicity & Equality Working Group and the judging Committee for the inaugural Jinty Nelson Award for Inspirational Teaching in History. As Vice-President, Professor Otele will particularly focus on matters pertaining to Membership, including the Society’s work on equality and diversity in the historical profession, and new developments in our support of early career historians.
Unfortunately, Prof. Joya Chatterji, our planned speaker for the Royal Historical Society Prothero Lecture on Friday 5 July 2019, can no longer be with us for that event.
In her place, however, we are delighted to announce that Dr. Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge) will give this year’s Prothero Lecture. Dr Sivasundaram’s title is “Waves Across the South: Monarchs, Travellers and Empire in the Pacific”. For more information, including venue, and an abstract, follow this link.
Directions and accessibility information for the venue are available here.
The Prothero Lecture will be followed by our annual reception and Royal Historical Society Publication, Fellowship and Teaching Awards for 2019.
All are welcome to join us for an evening that celebrates some of the very best in current historical scholarship and practice!
Wellcome Trust, Medical History/Humanities & Plan S: RHS Interim Working Paper
This RHS working paper explores Plan S developments primarily from the perspective of Wellcome-funded Humanities researchers (for whom the policy applies to new research article submissions from 1 January 2020). The paper formed part of a wider discussion with Robert Kiley and Simon Chaplin of the Trust on 9 April 2019. A representative from Wellcome will offer a response in late May, at which time a further clarification of Plan S implementation guidance is expected. We’ll post the Wellcome response when it is in hand and hope that these texts will help Wellcome-funded historians as well as History journals and learned societies navigate the new Plan S requirements.
The Working Paper can be downloaded here.
A meeting of UK History editors and learned society representatives is being held at the Institute for Historical Research on 26 April 2019, to discuss the potential implications of Plan S and the best ways of responding to this new development. We (RHS) will aim to report back on the this meeting if information that might be useful for History researchers emerges from its discussions. However, given that additional guidance on Plan S is expected in late May, we would expect that to be the most likely point at which greater clarification is available.
In the meantime, for Wellcome Trust-funded historians planning research article submissions from 1 January 2020, at the moment (and NB this is a rapidly moving frontier) the most likely route to Plan S compliance in the short-term looks to be self-deposit of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC with a CC BY licence and zero-embargo. You will find this pathway described in:
To determine whether the Wellcome Trust will cover APC charges for your preferred publication from 1 January 2020, see their updated open access guidance.
The Royal Historical Society does not at present have a full list of History journals with a zero embargo policy for AAMs, but examples of publisher open access policies include:
We welcome feedback on this document. Please contact Dr Katherine Foxhall, RHS Research and Communications Manager by email: k.foxhall@royalhistsoc.org