The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the appointment and election of four new members to its governing Council. These appointments follow this year’s election round for new Councillors, in autumn 2024, and the appointment of a Secretary for Professional Engagement following an open call for this Council role earlier in the year.
The newly elected Officer and Councillors were announced at the Society’s AGM, held on 22 November 2024, and now join the President, Officers and fellow Councillors as trustees of the Society. They join the Society alongside Professor Lucy Noakes,(University of Essex), the incoming President of the Society, who also began her term on 22 November.
Dr Catherine Feely (University of Derby), RHS Councillor
Dr Catherine Feely (generally known as Cath) is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Derby and a social and cultural historian of modern Britain.
Cath’s research focuses on the consumption and adaptation of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly through the study of publishing and press cultures, and the history of reading and writing. Articles and essays have appeared in journals including History Workshop Journal, Journal of Victorian Culture, European Review of History and edited collections. She co-edited Historical Networks in the Book Trade (2016) with John Hinks. She is currently writing a book on the publishing history of Karl Marx’s Capital in English.
Prior to being appointed at Derby in 2014, Cath taught at the universities of Manchester, Durham and Sheffield. She has led curricular innovation in Derby’s provision of public history teaching and is College Lead in External Engagement for the College of Arts, Humanities and Education. She is active in forming partnerships with museums and heritage sites, leading to collaborative research and knowledge exchange as well as opportunities for students. Cath also conducts pedagogic research on civic engagement and creativity in historical training and considers teaching an integral part of her research process.
My experience in UK HE over the last fifteen years has led both to a profound commitment to the role of history and heritage in civic life and an insight into the myriad threats to the widespread survival of the discipline at University-level across the sector.
As Councillor of the Royal Historical Society for the next four years, I hope to aid the Society in making the case for historians and historical thinking as crucial to a society facing major technological and environmental disruption, and its consequences.
Professor Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham), RHS Councillor
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, she was Professor of Cultural History at the University of Sheffield.
Karen’s research focusses on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the home and material culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2020), a microhistory of the well-known rabbit-birth hoax.
Her current project is the Leverhulme-funded ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820′ which uses thousands of familiar letters by men and women to explore people’s intimate experiences of the body.
I am proud to have been elected to Council. Over 25 years, mainly at the Universities of Sheffield and Birmingham, I have developed a strong record in research, teaching, public engagement, leadership and management and I will draw on this experience as I represent the broad community of historians served by the Society.
I am especially committed to EDI and to the social value of outstanding historical research: these will be my principal drivers as a Councillor.
Professor Matthias Neumann (University of East Anglia), Secretary for Professional Engagement and RHS Councillor
Matthias Neumann is Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia and the Society’s Secretary for Professional Engagement. A historian of the Soviet Union, Matthias is a former President, and current Vice President, of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).
Matthias’s publications include The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917-1932 (2011) and the edited volume Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide: Tradition, Rupture and Modernity (2017). His current research project examines cultural exchange programmes which enabled American children to visit the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As Secretary for Professional Engagement and a member of the RHS Council, Matthias will lead the Society’s work on training, skills and careers development.
Dr Jesús Sanjurjo (University of Strathclyde), RHS Councillor
Jesús Sanjurjo is a Leverhulme & Chancellor’s Fellow in Atlantic World History at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Before joining Strathclyde, he taught at the universities of Cambridge, Cardiff and York. He obtained his PhD in 2018 at the University of Leeds, supported by an AHRC-WRoCAH PhD scholarship.
Sanjurjo is a historian of the Atlantic World who specialises in radical politics, race, slavery, carceral systems, and state violence in Spain’s Atlantic Empire ca. 1700-1900. His first book, In the Blood of Our Brothers. Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 (University of Alabama Press, 2021) was a finalist for the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize. In December 2023, Editorial Comares published its Spanish edition.
Since then, Jesús has been working on two major research projects: one focused on the political repression unleashed by the colonial authorities in the aftermath of Manuel Lorenzo’s failed revolution in Santiago de Cuba in 1836 (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) and a second project centred on tracking the genesis of systemic racism in the Spanish Empire’s carceral system.
Jesús was elected as a member of the Society’s Council in November 2024 on a platform to represent the experiences of early career members from across the country.