In May 2025, members of the Royal Historical Society's Council visited the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, Penryn, as part of the Society's annual programme of visits to departments across the UK. Visits are a chance to meet not just with historians working across the university, and with university managers, but also with undergraduate and postgraduate students to learn more about their experience of study. In this post we hear from Charlotte Arthurs, a final year History and Politics student on her three years studying at the Cornwall Campus. Central to Charlotte's hugely positive experience has been attention placed at Penryn on interdisciplinary teaching. The Society's next two visits are to the historians and history students at the universities of Aberdeen and Suffolk, with further visits planned later in 2025 and 2026.

In this post Michael Taylor introduces his new volume in the Royal Historical Society's Camden Series, 'The Papers of Admiral George Grey', published in June 2025. The volume presents the memoir, journal, and correspondence of George Grey (1809-1891), son of the Whig prime minister Earl Grey. It 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. 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 First Book Prize 2025 recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of history monographs published in 2024. This year's shortlist of eight titles is now available and follows an open call for early career historians to submit a first sole-authored monograph, published last year, for consideration. Two final winners of the 2025 prize will be chosen, with the announcement to take place in July. Also now available: the shortlist of the Society's Early Career Article Prize, 2025, for an article written by an early career historian within three years of completion of a PhD.