The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the election of three new members to its governing Council. These appointments follow this year’s election round for new Councillors, in autumn 2025.
The newly elected Councillors will take up their roles following the next meeting of the Society’s governing Council on 21 November and will hold their posts for four years.
Stella, Dave and Catriona will replace three serving Councillors who next month step down at the end of their terms: Professor Cait Beaumont (London South Bank University), Dr Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge) and Professor Rebekah Lee (University of Oxford).
Dr Stella Fletcher
Dr Stella Fletcher studied at the University of Warwick (BA 1986, PhD 1992), where she is an honorary fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She taught at the University of Manchester until 2012, from which point she became a full-time carer.
She has served on the Council of the Society for Renaissance Studies and as honorary secretary of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and currently undertakes editorial work for the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance.
Her publications include A Very Agreeable Society: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1961-2011 (2011), Roscoe and Italy (2012) and The Popes and Britain (2017). More recent projects have included compiling material for heritage boards, but what Stella most enjoys is hamming it up on radio, television or for live audiences.
While it is right and proper that the Royal Historical Society campaigns against the loss of academic posts, the reality is that historians are being made redundant or choosing to retire from university employment. They are still historians. Without the structures of a university environment, they have all the more need of a sense of belonging to the wider community of historians and must not feel excluded from the RHS.
When I gave up university teaching to become a carer, I carried on writing, but had to change the sort of history I wrote, tailoring it to the resources I could access locally or online. As the years passed, this became increasingly challenging: commissions dried up.
Now that I can return to active involvement in the world of history, I would like to champion those historians who find themselves outside a university environment and encourage them to contact me with their thoughts about how they would like the RHS to serve them.
Dr Dave Hitchcock
Dr Dave Hitchcock is a historian of early modern social and cultural history. He teaches at Canterbury Christ Church University where he is Reader in Early Modern British History.
Dave mainly works on histories of early modern poverty and vagrancy. He sits on the committee of the Social History Society and is a trustee of the Economic History Society (and liaises between the two).
As a Councillor of the Royal Historical Society, I particularly want to contribute to the Society’s advocacy on behalf of the wider historical profession, its departmental programme of visits, and to its defence of the value of history and of history teaching and research.
In particular I want to contribute to work addressing UK policymakers on the pressing issues facing history, the wider humanities, and universities today.
Professor Catriona Pennell
Catriona Pennell is Professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at the University of Exeter on its beautiful Cornwall campus in Penryn. She recently began a three-year term as Faculty APVC, Research and Impact (HASS) where she is working to promote a positive, kind, and humane research culture amid institutional and sector pressures.
Catriona specialises in the history of 19th and 20th century Britain and Ireland with a particular focus on the relationship between war, empire, experience, and memory. She has published on various aspects of the experience of the First World War and understandings of cultural historical approaches to the study of modern conflict more generally.
Catriona’s current research explores the relationship between youth, education, and the transmission of cultural memory and its role in processes of social justice, conflict resolution, and geopolitical advocacy. She has served on several academic and non-academic boards and committees, including charity trustee boards and her local parish council, most recently joining the editorial board of Brill’s History of Warfare series in September 2025.
I am delighted to be joining RHS Council and would like to thank everyone who enabled this to happen. Having seen, firsthand, the empowering effect of a RHS visit to my home department, I want to ‘pay it forward’ and work to lobby and advocate for history (in single and multi-disciplinary) departments around the UK during this unprecedented time of uncertainty and hardship in the HE sector.
