At its meeting in July 2019 RHS Council elected 45 Fellows, 15 Members, and 20 Postgraduate Members, a total of 80 in all. These new members were formally welcomed to the Society at Professor Penny Roberts’ RHS Lecture on Friday 20 September 2019.
We are pleased to report that over half of the new Fellows elected were women, and that equal numbers of men and women were elected to the Membership and Postgraduate Membership. In terms of geographical distribution, our new members come from around the UK, as well as Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan and the USA. While the majority of the new Fellows hold academic appointments at universities, specializing in a very wide range of fields, this is by no means the case for all. Fellows elected on this occasion include archivists, educational and heritage consultants, and the director of a policy centre. This diversity of interests, reflects the Society’s aim of recognising the vital contribution to historical scholarship made by those in other professions.
The new Members also have a wide variety of historical interests. All those newly elected to the Fellowship, Membership and Postgraduate Membership bring a valuable range of expertise and experience that will enrich the Society and help it to fulfil its objective of representing the diverse body of scholars engaged in historical scholarship.
Our next deadline for Society Fellowship and Membership is 7 October. Additional information can be found here.
Fellowship
Gemma Allen
Dayna Barnes
Tobias Becker
Matthew Bingham
Luke Blaxill
Hilary Carey
Jeng-Guo Chen
Rebekah Clements
Pamela Clemit
Guillemette Crouzet
Judith Curthoys
Johanna Dale
Jennifer Davey
Coleman Dennehy
Karey Draper
Hugo Drochon
Katherine East
Margaret Ezell
Anna Greenwood
Ryan Hanley
Katherine Harloe
Catherine Hindson
Natasha Hodgson
Tom Hulme
David Jordan
Louise Kettle
Miles Larmer
Grace Lees-Maffei
Victoria Leonard
Michael Maddison
Kirsten McKenzie
Dwayne Menezes
Emily Michelson
Cai Parry-Jones
Stephen Sandford
Sally Sheard
John Slight
Diana Spencer
Michael Talbot
Clare Taylor
Seth Thevoz
Boris Volodarsky
Rob Waters
Keira Williams
Man Kong Wong
Membership
Rosamaria Alibrandi
Matteo Bonifacio
David Brazendale
Timothy Causer
Bettina De Cosnac
Esther Freeman
Marion Gibson
Alexander Hutton
Caroline Laske
Neil Murphy
Edward Reid-Smith
Lucy Santos
Uttara Shahani
Swati Shastri
Shutaro Takeda
Postgraduate Membership
Jordan Beavis
Hillary Burlock
Jane Campbell
Rodney Curtis
Steven Driver
Helen Esfandiary
Catherine Freeman
Meira Gold
Nathan Hazlehurst
Tyler Herber
Otis Illert
Kate Lawton
Peter Morgan-Barnes
JC Niala
Mary Ononokpono
Oliver Parken
Beatrice Pestarino
Edwin Rose
Dilara Scholz
Fabio Simonetti
Image: New Fellows at the RHS, 20 Sept 2019 (Credit: Grace Lees-Maffei / Oleg Benesch)
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
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
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.
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 2019
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. 
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)’. 
