RHS News

Winners of the Society’s 2025 Early Career Article and First Book Prizes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

 

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

 

Peter Gatrell gives the Society’s 2025 Prothero Lecture

On 2 July, we were delighted to host Professor Peter Gatrell FBA to deliver this year’s Royal Historical Society Prothero Lecture: ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’.

Peter’s lecture — held at Mary Ward House, London, and online — 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.

As Peter argued in this lecture, to consider refugees’ encounters with refugee-creating, refugee-hosting, and refugee-deterring states – and with the organisations charged with their protection and assistance – offers new approaches to refugee history and the writing of refugees into modern global history.

Our great thanks to Peter for his lecture and to all those who attended in person and online. A video and audio recording of the 2025 RHS Prothero Lecture will be available shortly.

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.

Established in 1969, Royal Historical Society’s Prothero Lecture – which is named for the historian and former RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924) – has been given annually since that date. Those invited to give the lecture are leading historians whose research has shaped how we think about the past. 

Prothero lecturers over the past five decades include, among many others, Samuel H. Beer, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Quentin Skinner, Brenda E. Stevenson, and Keith Thomas. Many of these lectures, subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, have been opportunities for leading scholars to reflect on their work and careers in the round.

 

‘Waterscapes’: forthcoming in the Society’s New Historical Perspectives book series

In August, the Society publishes the next title in its New Historical Perspective book series: Waterscapes: Reservoirs, Environment and Identity in Modern England and Wales, by Andrew McTominey.

A study of reservoir planning and construction, Waterscapes is an important and novel contribution to environmental and urban history, and histories of the English and Welsh countryside.

 

 

The building of reservoirs in England and Wales was key to urban growth across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with the management of waterworks projects closely tied to the social and economic fortunes of rural areas, as well as the treatment of urban populations.

Drawing on methods from environmental history, cultural history and historical geography, this book explores the multiple and long-term impacts of reservoir construction and management in rural England and Wales. It examines how reservoirs transformed the rural environment, the management of the urban-rural hinterland, the development of cultural landscapes, the expansion of novel leisure activities, and the social impact on local communities.

Incorporating case studies from Leeds’s Washburn Valley, Liverpool’s Vyrnwy Reservoir and Birmingham’s Elan Reservoir, among others, Waterscapes‘ comparative approach highlights commonalities and differences in waterworks management across the country. It transforms our understanding of the national water industry, contemporary attitudes to the environment, and the identities – civic, gender and professional – that were intertwined with these waterscapes.

NHP titles, published and forthcoming, in 2025

 

Andrew McTominey’s Waterscapes is the 23rd title in the Society’s New Historical Perspective book series for early career historians. As for all titles in the series, Waterscapes is published Open Access online, and free to access by all, as well as in paperback print.

 

RHS Council elections, 2025: call for nominations from Fellows

Nominations are now invited from Fellows of the Royal Historical Society to stand for election to the Society’s governing Council. The Society seeks to elect three new Council members (trustees) in 2025, to replace serving Council members. Newly elected Councillors will take up their roles from December 2025.

Closing date for nominations: Monday 11 August 2025.

The work of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) is governed by its Council, which comprises ‘Officers’ (Trustees with a specific remit) and ‘Councillors’ (Trustees without portfolio).

Trustees of the Society play a vital role in working on behalf of our fellows, members and the greater historian community in establishing our mission, vision and strategy, as well as considering crucial governance matters that ensure the ongoing sustainability of our charitable work.

The newly-elected Councillors will perform a full and active role in the Society’s governance and its work to champion and support historians of all kinds, the historical profession, and the practice of history.

This is an important time for the Society as it looks to launch its new three-year strategy, 2026-28, under the leadership of its President, Professor Lucy Noakes, and supported by the Society’s professional office based at University College London.

In accordance with By-law XXIV, Fellows of the Royal Historical Society are invited to nominate current Fellows, willing to serve as Councillors for a term of four years that commences in December 2025.

Please see the Society’s website for the institutional affiliations and subject expertise of current Members of Council.

The Society desires that the membership of its Council be fully representative of the community of historians in the United Kingdom.

Nominations must be supported by one Proposer and four Seconders, who are current Ordinary, Retired or Emeritus Fellows of the Society. 

The call for nominations runs to Monday 11 August with voting due to open in the week commencing 18 August. Voting by Fellows will close in the week commencing 22 September, with results announced in October.

For more on the role of an RHS Councillor, and how to submit a nomination, please see here.

Submission of nominations is via the Society’s online applications platform, here.

 

New and forthcoming volumes in the Society’s Camden series

This year the Society publishes three new volumes in its Camden series of scholarly editions of primary sources. The first two volumes are published in June and August and available online and in print from Cambridge University Press.

NEW, VOLUME 69: The Papers of Admiral George Grey, edited by Michael Taylor (June 2025)

The Papers of Admiral George Grey presents the memoir, journal, and correspondence of George Grey, son of the Whig prime minister Earl Grey.

The volume documents the Grey family’s experience of the Whig ministry of 1830–1834, and George Grey’s own naval career which took him from the Battle of Navarino during the Greek War of Independence, to a decisive survey of the Falkland Islands, and then to the capital cities of South America during their pivotal early decades of independence

In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the political, diplomatic, naval, and imperial histories of the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The Papers of Admiral George Grey is published online and in print by Cambridge University Press (from June 2025). Due to a subvention from the Society, this volume will be available fully open access.

 

FORTHCOMING, VOLUME 70: The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541), edited by Helen Newsome-Chandler (August 2025)

This volume presents the surviving holograph correspondence of Margaret Tudor, queen of Scots (1489–1541) 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.

The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541), is published online and in print by Cambridge University Press (from August 2025).

The third and final Camden volume published in 2025 — A Collector Collected: The Journals of William Upcott, 1803-1823, edited by Mark Philp, Aysuda Aykan and Curtis Leung — is published in November.

Recent volumes in the Camden series

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).

  • Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, was a prominent figure amongst the opposition to Charles I, a religious radical and intellectual who emerged as a successful popular leader in the early months of the English Civil War. This volume publishes the richly detailed household accounts kept for Brooke and his widow, Katherine, on an annual basis between 1640 and 1649.

Allen Leeper’s Letters Home, 1908–1912. An Irish-Australian at Edwardian Oxford, edited by David Hayton (July 2024).

  • Allen Leeper, Oxford undergraduate and future Foreign Office mandarin, wrote regularly to his family in Australia from 1908 until he left university in 1912. Leeper’s letters, in Balliol College archives and the State Library of Victoria, record his experiences at Balliol, among a ‘golden generation’ decimated by the First World War, and on his extensive travels in Europe. They provide a vivid picture of a continent on the eve of war, written by someone whose background afforded a degree of objectivity.

The Last Days of English Tangier. The Out-Letter Book of Governor Percy Kirke, 1681–1683, edited by John Childs (November 2023).

  • Governor Percy Kirke’s Out-Letter Book, here transcribed verbatim and annotated, covers the terminal decline of English Tangier, ending just before the arrival of Lord Dartmouth’s expedition charged with demolishing the town and evacuating all personnel. In 152 official letters, Kirke’s correspondence traces the decay of both the town’s military fabric and the soldiers’ morale and effectiveness, and the impossibility of reaching a satisfactory modus vivendi with the leaders of the besieging Moroccan armed forces.

La Prinse et mort du roy Richart d’Angleterre, and Other Works by Jehan Creton, edited and translated by Lorna A. Finlay (June 2023).

  • Jehan Creton accompanied Richard II on his expedition to Ireland in 1399 and witnessed his capture by Henry Lancaster, who usurped the throne to reign as Henry IV. Creton’s account is of crucial importance for historians of the period, as he contradicts the official version of events in the Parliamentary Roll. This a completely new translation of the work, correcting the previous edition dating from 1824. This new Camden edition also includes Creton’s other known writings, the two epistles and four ballades.

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

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 is Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham, with expertise in the political and electoral history of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. Siobhan is Professor of Early Modern History at Keele University, with research expertise in the economic and social history of Britain and the Atlantic World. Both have extensive experience of preparing and publishing scholarly editions of primary texts.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Calls for research funding from the Royal Historical Society: seven current programmes

The Society currently invites applications for the following four schemes — open to historians across a range of career stages — with closing dates between 11 July and 5 September 2025. For further information on each programme, eligibility and how to apply please follow the links below.

Closing dates in July 2025

  • Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships providing funding of between £500 and £1,250 to support innovations in the teaching of history in higher education, with projects to take place in the academic year 2025-26. Applicants must also be members of the Royal Historical Society. Next closing date: Friday 11 July 2025.
  • Funded Book Workshops providing funding of £2,000 per workshop to host an in-person day seminar for historians who are currently writing a second or third monograph. Workshops bring together six specialist readers to discuss a book manuscript in detail prior to submission to the publisher. Applicants must also be members of the Royal Historical Society. Next closing date: Friday 11 July 2025.

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 2025.
  • 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 2025.

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.

 

The Papers of Admiral George Grey (1809-1891): new Camden Series volume

The latest volume of the Society’s Camden series makes available The Papers of Admiral George Grey. Edited by Michael Taylor, this new volume brings together the memoir, journal, and correspondence of the naval officer George Grey (1809-1891), son of the Whig prime minister Earl Grey.

The volume documents the Grey family’s experience of the Whig ministry of 1830–1834, and George Grey’s own naval career which took him from the Battle of Navarino during the Greek War of Independence, to a decisive survey of the Falkland Islands, and then to the capital cities of South America during their pivotal early decades of independence.

In doing so, Michael’s volume sheds new light on the political, diplomatic, naval, and imperial histories of the early and mid-nineteenth century. To accompany publication, Michael has also written on George Grey and his work to collect the papers for the Society’s blog.

The full text of The Papers of Admiral George Grey is now available Open Access via Cambridge University Press, following a subvention by the Royal Historical Society.

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 Series makes important, previously unpublished, texts available to researchers. Each volume is edited by a specialist historian who provides an expert introduction and commentary. The complete Camden Series now comprises over 380 volumes of primary source material, published by Cambridge University Press, ranging from the early medieval to late-twentieth century Britain.

 

In 2025, the Society will publish three new Camden volumes.

Forthcoming titles are: The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541), edited by Helen Newsome-Chandler, which will appear in August 2025 and A Collector Collected: The Journals of William Upcott, 1803-1823, edited by Mark Philp, Aysuda Aykan and Curtis Leung (November).

 

Shortlists released for the Society’s 2025 First Book and Early Career Article prizes

Eight monographs and eight journal articles have been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Historical Society First Book and Early Career Article prizes.

The shortlists follow an open call for eligible books and articles, published in 2024. Two winners will be announced, in July, for each prize.

Winners of the First Book Prize will each receive £1000 while those for the Early Career Article prize receive £250. Our congratulations to all sixteen authors whose work has been shortlisted in 2025.

The eight monographs shortlisted for the First Book Prize are:

  • Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press)
  • Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age, by Simeon Koole (University of Chicago Press)
  • Female Servants in Early Modern England, by Charmian Mansell (British Academy / Oxford University Press)
  • The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838: Institutions and Trade during the First Globalization, by Juan Jose Rivas Moreno (Palgrave MacMillan)
  • Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948, by Jules Skotnes-Brown (Johns Hopkins University Press)
  • The Quislings. The Trials of Norwegian Wartime Collaborators, 1941–1964, by Anika Seemann (Cambridge University Press)
  • Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century, by Fiona Smyth (Manchester University Press)
  • Desire and Disunity: Christian Communities and Sexual Norms in the Late Antique West, by Ulriika Vihervalli (Liverpool University Press)

Further details of each monograph are available here.

The eight journal articles shortlisted for the Early Career Article Prize are:

  • Beth Bhargava, ‘The National Front and Environmental Politics, 1967–90’, Modern British History
  • James Burns, ‘The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West’, Journal of Late Antiquity
  • Katherine Burns, ‘‘She died from grief’: Trauma and Emotion in Information Wanted Advertisements’, Slavery & Abolition
  • Aisha Djelid, “The master whished to reproduce”: Slavery, Forced Intimacy, and Enslavers’ Interference in Sexual Relationships in the Antebellum South, 1808–1861′, American Nineteenth Century History
  • William Jones, “You are going to be my Bettman”: Exploitative Sexual Relationships and the Lives of the Pipel in Nazi Concentration Camps’, The Journal of Holocaust Research
  • Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, History Workshop Journal
  • Matthew Lee, ‘Slavery, Colonialism and Civic Culture: The Development of Philanthropic Institutions in North East Scotland’, Northern Scotland
  • Ollie Randall, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Further details of each article are available here.

 

Society’s former Secretary for Research appointed chair of History sub-panel for REF2029

Jonathan Morris, Professor of History and Director of Research Culture and Environment at the University of Hertfordshire, has been appointed Chair of the History sub-panel for REF2029. The History subject panel will be responsible for assessing submissions for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) which is expected to report in 2029. History is one of 34 disciplinary categories for which panels are currently being assembled.

Between 2018 and 2023 Jonathan was a member of the Royal Historical Society’s Council and served as its Secretary for Research and chair of the Research Policy Committee to November 2023.

News of the appointments of panel chairs and their deputies was made by Research England on 22 May. An announcement on the deputy chair for the History sub-panel is expected shortly.

The Society is monitoring developments in the REF2029 cycle and provides guides and updates as part of the Advocacy & Policy section of its website.

 

Society’s President and Councillors visit historians at the University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus

This week the Society’s President, Professor Lucy Noakes, along with Councillors Dr Cath Feely and Dr Melissa Calaresu, visited historians at the Cornwall campus of the University of Exeter, at Penryn.

The visit included meetings with historians working in the department and wider university, students and researchers, university managers, community history groups and partners with whom the department works, and members of the Society resident in west Cornwall.

The visit included a public event, on 21 May, ‘Cultural Memory and the Two World Wars’, with Lucy and Catriona Pennell, Professor of Modern History and Memory Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cornwall, at the University of Exeter, Penryn. Our thanks to Catriona as the visit’s host and all who attended the discussion sessions and public event.

You can read more about the Society’s recent two-day visit to staff and students at the University Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cornwall (HaSS Cornwall) here: ‘Royal Historical Society praise for University’s Cornwall historians’ (published by the University of Exeter).

UK visits to historians are a regular feature of the Society’s annual event’s programme. Forthcoming visits are to the University of Aberdeen (17 and 18 September) and the University of Suffolk at Ipswich (21 October), to meet with academic historians, students, public history groups, and Society members from the area.

We are delighted to announce that the guest lecture at Aberdeen (Wednesday 17 September) will be given by Professor Matthew J. Smith (UCL and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery). Further details of these forthcoming visits will be released shortly.