RHS News

Since 2009 the Royal Historical Society has worked with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the publisher Brepols to fund and manage the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). 

From January 2025 the RHS will be ending its formal association with the Bibliography, which will proceed as a partnership between the IHR and Brepols. The Bibliography will continue, as presently, with a dedicated Editor, Section Editors, and publication of regular updates of bibliographic records. Funding is now in place to support this new IHR / Brepols partnership, and the Bibliography.  

Professor Roey Sweet, who currently serves as BBIH’s Academic Director, will continue in this role. In addition, Brepols will enable members of the RHS to remain eligible for individual subscriptions to the Bibliography at discounted rates. Until January 2025, the Society will continue to provide its present levels of support for the Bibliography, including a smooth hand over to the new arrangement.

The Society’s decision to end its involvement with the Bibliography was taken by the RHS Council following a recent review of the Society’s wider publishing strategy. This considered how the RHS best uses its limited resources to support a range of existing and new academic publishing, now and in the future. More on these developments and new initiatives will be made public in the coming months.

The Society would like to thank all those involved with the Bibliography during this transition phase. In particular, we wish to thank editorial, and other, staff at the Institute of Historical Research and at Brepols, and Professor Sweet for her considerable contribution to the Bibliography.

More on these forthcoming management changes is also available here from the Institute of Historical Research.

Visits are an important opportunity, for members of the Society’s Council and staff, to meet with historians, researchers and students, and to discuss priorities, interests and concerns relating to research, teaching and the profession.

Having met with colleagues at Edge Hill and Northampton earlier this year, the Society continues its 2023 programme of Visits to history departments with meetings at Canterbury Christ Church and Kent (11 September), the Highlands and Islands (18 September) and Hertfordshire (16 October).

Each Visit includes a public lecture given by a guest lecturer to which all are welcome. Further details and links for booking are below. We look forward to seeing you at one of these events.

‘The Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved African People and Restoration England’, with William Pettigrew (Lancaster University), RHS-Sponsored Lecture at Canterbury Christ Church University: 5pm, Monday 11 September 2023

 ‘”In memory of my Great Grandfather and his infant son”: Histories, communities and feelings in the centenary of the First World War’, with Lucy Noakes (University of Essex), RHS-Sponsored Lecture at the Centre for History, Highlands and Islands University, Dornoch: 5.30pm, Monday 18 September 2023

‘Naming and Shaming? Telling Bad Bridget Stories’, with Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University Belfast) and Leanne McCormick (University of Ulster), RHS-Sponsored Lecture at University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield: 5.30pm, Monday 16 October 2023

Visits in early 2024 include to the universities of York and York St John (March) and Brunel (May), with guest lectures from Fay Bound Alberti (KCL) and Corinne Fowler (Leicester).

The video of the Society’s recent Workshop — ‘Scholarly Editing for Historians: an Introduction and Guide to Working with Primary Texts’ — is now available.

The event — hosted by the Richard Gaunt and Siobhan Talbott (Series Editors for the Society’s Camden Series of Primary Sources) — provided a general guide to editing, alongside two focused session on working with medieval, early modern and modern sources.

Richard and Siobhan were joined in the breakout sessions by two recent contributors to the Camden Series, Daniel Patterson, editor of The Diary of George Lloyd, 1642-1718 (2022), and Jayne Gifford, co-editor of Sir Earle Page’s British War Cabinet Diary, 1941-42 (2021),

Topics covered in the Workshop include: advice on how to select a suitable primary source; options for publishing scholarly editions; approaching a publisher, and what to consider when writing a proposal; determining editorial conventions; and writing an introduction for an edition.

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. 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, ranging from the early medieval to late-twentieth century Britain. The full series is available online via Cambridge University Press, providing a rich conspectus of source material for British History as well as insights into the development of historical scholarship in the English speaking world.

Today the Society publishes two new Camden volumes each year in association with Cambridge University Press.

Contributing to the Series

Richard and Siobhan welcome submissions for future Camden volumes. If you have a proposal for a Camden Society volume, please:

• contact the editors with an initial enquiry camden.editors@royalhistsoc.org OR
• complete and submit the Camden Series Proposal Form and send your completed proposal to the Editors: camden.editors@royalhistsoc.org.

We are very pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Funded Book Workshop Grants. These awards, launched in 2023, provide historians working on a second or third monograph with funds to organise and host a day workshop with six invited specialist readers to discuss a manuscript in detail.

The grant recipients for 2023 are:

• Jennifer Aston (University of Northumbria) for her project: ‘For Wives Alone’: Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in Nineteenth Century England and Wales
• Tim Grady (University of Chester) for his project: ‘The Unwelcome Gravediggers’: War, Memory and the Unmaking of British-German Relations

These workshops will be held in the academic year 2023-24.

Further details of current calls for Royal Historical Society research funding (August-November 2023) are available here.

The video of this year’s Royal Historical Society Prothero Lecture is now available. The 2023 lecture — ‘To Do and Be Undone: Enslaved Black Life, Courtship, and Marriage in the Antebellum South’ — was delivered on 5 July by Brenda E. Stevenson, Hillary Rodham Clinton Professor of Women’s History at Oxford University.

Professor Stevenson’s lecture centres on the familial ideals and realities of enslaved Black people in the American South via their courtship and marriages, ritually and experientially. The trope of the missing Black family has lived large in the ambitious research designs of scholars, the critical imagination of the public, and the caustic decisions of policy makers. The reality, however, is that even through the pain and loss brought on by centuries of slavery and systemic racialised inequalities of all sorts, Black people wanted and were able to create family ties that fostered humanity, assured survival, and even undergird post-emancipation progress across the generations.

The lecture describes and analyses courtship/romantic attitudes and behaviours, the traits that adults desired and despised in a partner, the negotiations with family and captors regarding one’s choice for a spouse, and the various kinds of ceremonies (or not) that signified one’s marital commitments.

The Royal Historical Society’s annual Prothero Lecture is named for the historian George W. Prothero (1848-1922) who — as President of the Society between 1901-05 — played a significant role in the professionalisation of the historical discipline and the Society’s role in supporting the historical profession.

Prothero Lectures have been given annually since 1969. Previous Prothero lecturers include, among many others, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Roy Foster, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram and Keith Thomas.

Allocation of research funding is central to the work of the Royal Historical Society in supporting historians and historical research. In 2022 the Society awarded £95,000 in funding to historians through open competitions and a further £30,000 in one-off programmes, generously assisted by partner organisations and donors.

The Society is particularly keen to allocate funding to those historians in greatest need of support and who do not have existing access to any institutional funds, or to sufficient funds, to support their research. We encourage, and welcome, applications from historians who do not have such access, and for whom awards would make a significant impact on their capacity to undertake research.

The following grant calls are currently open and accepting applications with deadlines between August and November 2023. For further details and how to submit an application, please follow the links provided.

Open Calls: applications invited

Postgraduate Research Support Grants – for History students, currently studying for a Masters degree or PhD. Awards of either £500 or £1000 to support specified research activities. Next closing date for applications: Friday 10 November 2023.

Early Career Research Support Grants – for early career historians (historians who are within 3 years of submitting their PhD in a historical subject) to undertake research. Awards of either £500 or £1000 to support specified research activities. Next closing date for applications: Friday 10 November 2023.

Please note: Applicants for Royal Historical Society funding must be members of the Society, with several exceptions for Postgraduate grants. To find out how to become a Fellow, Associate Fellow, Member or Postgraduate Member, please see our Join Us page.

All enquiries about Research Funding should be sent to the Society’s Membership and Grants Officer at: membership@royalhistsoc.org.

HEADER IMAGE: Jar with scholars, China, late 15th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.

At its latest meeting on 5 July 2023, the RHS Council elected 39 Fellows, 23 Associate Fellows, 29 Members and 63 Postgraduate Members, a total of 154 people newly associated with the Society, from today.

The majority of the new Fellows hold academic appointments at universities, specialising in a very wide range of fields; but also include museum curators, archivists, heritage consultants, and independent researchers and writers. The Society is an international community of historians and our latest intake includes Fellows from ten countries: Belgium, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Ireland, Norway, United Kingdom, Turkey, 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 broadcasting and journalism, conservation, libraries and archives, publishing, public and community history, and teaching.

The new Members have a similarly wide range of historical interests, and include individuals employed in universities, and as historical guides, museum managers, teachers, librarians and lawyers – together with independent and community historians. Our new Postgraduate Members are studying for higher degrees in History, or related subjects, at 36 different universities in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Turkey 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 14 August 2023, with the next closing date after this being 23 October 2023. Further details on RHS Fellowship and Membership categories (Fellow, Associate Fellow, Member and Postgraduate Member); benefits of membership; deadlines for applications throughout 2023; and how to apply, are available here.

New Fellows, elected July 2023

• William Thomas Allison
• Larissa Allwork
• Melanie Bell
• Julian Bennett
• Lynsey Black
• Elma Brenner
• Emma Cole
• Lorenzo Costaguta
• Marysa Demoor
• Roger Domeneghetti
• James Downs
• Dilnoza Duturaeva
• Lukas Engelmann
• Brian K. Feltman
• Meg Foster
• Sydney Freeman, Jr.
• Daniel Gordon
• Kenneth Jeffrey
• Lucy Kaufman
• Sam Kennerley
• Jonathan Kewley
• Stephen Legg
• Elizabeth L’Estrange
• Michael Livingston
• Helena Lopes
• Konstantina Maragkou
• Katherine McDonough
• Taka Oshikiri
• Ben Quail
• James Quinn
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
• Adam Sammut
• Michael Schulte
• David Snape
• Matthew Wells
• Melanie Williams
• Ruowei Yang
• Tom Young
• Xuduo Zhao

New Associate Fellows, elected July 2023

• Catherine Elizabeth Batch
• Gabriele Bonomelli
• Graham Brack
• Thomas Chidwick
• Diane Clements
• Manuele Cogni
• John Paul Davis
• Rob Fitt
• Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh
• Lucy Hockley
• Di Hu
• Thomas Alexander Husøy-Ciaccia
• Asia Mobeen Hussain
• Wojciech J. Kosior
• John Lowe
• Nurlan Namatov
• David Nicoll
• Abdallah Omar
• Ute Oswald
• Johanna Strong
• Brodie Taylor
• Matthew White
• Tatyana Zhukova

New Members, elected July 2023

• Samonnoy Biswas
• Aaron Brady
• John Bullock
• William Cheng
• Marina Demirchyan
• Oliver Denton
• Stephen Devine
• James Endersby
• Eleanor Ferguson
• Melanie Fisher
• Larry Harwood
• Sharon Hill-Boulton
• Ilkay Hultum
• Joanna Hymas-Shackleton
• Graham Keen
• Michael Lakeman
• Neil Maxfield
• Gabriela Morales Casas Y Sanchez
• Akintunde Osuntoyinbo
• Emily Pomfret
• Claire Silvester
• William Stewart
• Alex VanSanders
• Benjamin Vostmyer
• Andrew Wallace
• Patrick Wills
• Jiarui Wu
• Kate Wvendth
• Andrew Young

New Postgraduate Members, elected July 2023

• Elizabeth Austin
• Berklee Baum
• Madeleine Burgess
• Malcolm Butler
• Yuxuan Cai
• Y.M. Carrington
• Shelley Castle
• Lauriane Cherki
• Arka Chowdhury
• Rachel Collett
• Emily Creo
• Salih Demirtas
• Josh Dight
• Emma Flanagan
• Baruch Gilinsky
• William Glaister
• Carolin Gluchowski
• Sara Green
• Julia Gustavsson
• Kyle Haynes
• Harriet Holme
• Chandini Jaswal
• Ashlee  Johnson
• Seong Hyun Kim
• Esther Knight
• Sümeyye Kocaman
• Dongsun Lee
• Oliver Lewis
• Tallulah Maait Pepperell
• Meghan McDonagh
• Anna McEwan
• Aoife Miralles
• Sudipto Mitra
• Lucy Moynihan
• Janna Mueller
• Patrick O’Dare
• Chukwuemeka Oko-Otu
• Emmanouil Peponas
• Alexander Pickering
• Teresa Porciani
• David Prosser
• Katharina Pruente
• Karel Pučelík
• Nicole Salomone
• Maria Laura Scifo
• Ben Sharp
• Nikolai Shatalin
• Islay Shelbourne
• Simon Smets
• Amy Stanning
• Javed Sultan
• Michelle Tessmann
• Trish Thomas
• Elizabeth Thomson
• Marieta Valdivia Lefort
• Yishu Wang
• Xinyi Wen
• Cecilia White
• Lois Wignall
• Daniel Wojahn
• Hongsik Woo
• Yixuan Zhao
• Qingyun Zhao

HEADER IMAGE: ‘Group Portrait’, Gillis van Tilborgh (Flemish, c.1625–c.1678), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.

The Society now invites applications for its programme of Masters’ Scholarships for the academic year 2023-24. This scheme provides financial support to students from groups currently underrepresented in academic History. Scholarships are worth £5000 each and are awarded to students who will begin a Masters’ degree in History (full or part-time) at a UK university from the start of the academic year, 2023-24.

Six Scholarships will be awarded for 2023-24. This year’s Scholarships are generously supported by the Past & Present Society and The Thriplow Charitable Trust, to which the Society is extremely grateful.

The programme, established in 2022, seeks to actively address underrepresentation and encourage Black and Asian students to consider academic research in History. By supporting Masters’ students the programme focuses on a key early stage in the academic training of future researchers. With these Scholarships, the Society seeks to support students who are without the financial means to study for a Masters’ in History. By doing so, we hope to improve the educational experience of early career historians engaged in a further degree.

There are no conditions on what the award may be spent and may be used to support fees, living expenses etc. during the degree course. Recipients also become Postgraduate Members of the Society.

For more on the RHS Masters’ Scholarships, and how to apply for the 2023-24 awards, please see here.

Applications are now invited, with a closing date of Monday 14 August 2023. All applications must be submitted via the Society’s online application portal.

The Society now invites applications for its Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships — a new RHS funding programme to support History teaching in UK Higher Education, launched today.

The Society looks to award a series of Teaching Fellowships, available for the sums of £500, £1000 and £1250, to be held in the academic year 2023-24. The Fellowships seek to help historians introduce new approaches to their teaching, or to undertake a defined study of an aspect of history teaching in UK Higher Education.

The Society defines approaches to teaching broadly for this Fellowship. For example, creation of a wholly new course or aspects of an existing course; provision of new activities within an established course; or assistance for students to undertake project work as part of a course. We also welcome applications that pilot or test new ideas in teaching, and which may not—at this time—become a feature of courses in future years.

Fellowships may equally support a short study relating to History teaching in UK Higher Education, within a department or more widely, and of interest to the wider profession. Approaches may include (but are not limited to):

• study relating to the development of teaching on a particular historical theme, topic, region or chronology; the scope and/or content of teaching in a subject area or UK region; or to student participation: for example, course selection;
• surveys of the profession on subjects relating to History teaching in UK Higher Education;
• promotion of the value of History teaching, and/or identification of high-quality and transferable teaching practices;
• an event to consider and promote aspects of teaching practice;
• initiatives to support History HE teachers at mid or later-career.

The Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships are named after Dame Jinty Nelson FBA, President of the Society between 2001 and 2005. Fellowships replace the Society’s previous Jinty Nelson Teaching Prize in a new and expanded funding programme for History teaching at undergraduate and Masters’ levels.

For more on this new programme, and how to apply, please see here.

Applications for Fellowships may be made via the Society’s online portal here.

Applications for this first round of Fellowships are now invited, with a closing date of 23:59 on Friday 25 August 2023.

Please note: applications for the award are reserved for current Fellows and members of the Society. If you wish to apply for membership, please visit our Join Us page.

The Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships are named after Dame Jinty Nelson FBA, President of the Society between 2001 and 2005. Fellowships replace the Society’s previous Jinty Nelson Teaching Prize in a new and expanded funding programme for History teaching at undergraduate and Masters’ levels.