The Royal Historical Society offers 4 annual PhD Fellowships for postgraduate historians in their third year of research at a UK university. The Fellowships comprise:

• Two RHS Centenary Fellowships: each Centenary Fellowship runs for 6-months and is worth £8,295 for final-year PhD students to complete their dissertations and to develop their research career.
• Two RHS Marshall Fellowships: each Marshall Fellowship runs for 6-months and is worth £8,295 for final-year PhD students to complete their dissertations and to develop their research career.

Marshall Fellowships are supported by the generosity of Professor Peter Marshall FBA, formerly Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London and President of the Royal Historical Society from 1996 to 2000.

All Fellowships are open to candidates without regard to nationality or academic affiliation. They are jointly held with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, where Fellows are based.

How to Apply for 2024-25

• Call for the Fellowships for the academic year 2024-25 will open with the Institute of Historical Research in late April 2024 (date tbc).
• Centenary and Marshall Fellowships are open to candidates without regard to nationality or current academic affiliation.
• The Fellowships are awarded to doctoral students who are completing a thesis in history (broadly defined) who have undertaken at least three years’ research on their chosen topic (and not more than four years full-time or six years part-time) at the beginning of the session for which the awards are made.
• These awards cannot be held in conjunction with any other substantial maintenance grant.

For full information on how to apply for the Centenary or Marshall Research Fellowships and to obtain further guidelines, please go to the IHR Doctoral Fellowships pages.

Centenary and Marshall Fellows, 2023-24

Clare V. Church, is an RHS Centenary Fellow held jointly with the Institute of Research, University of London. Clare is a fourth-year PhD researcher at Aberystwyth University, studying within the Department of History and Welsh History under the supervision of Dr Siân Nicholas and Dr Miguel Hernandez. Originally from Canada, Clare completed her Master of Arts at New York University and attained her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo.

The subject of her doctoral research focuses on the cultural representations of women celebrities, and their subsequent influence on gender roles and national morale throughout the Second World War. Specifically, the project applies the concept of ‘patriotic femininity’ – originally developed by Phil Goodman within the context of British Second World War studies – transnationally, exploring celebrity case studies in the UK, US, and France. Studying the mediated depictions of celebrities like Vera Lynn, the Andrews Sisters, and Joséphine Baker, the project endeavours to understand how the ‘ideal woman’ was framed within these distinct national wartime contexts.

Helena Neimann Erikstrup is an RHS Marshall Fellow, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Helena is a fourth-year DPhil student in History of Art at the University of Oxford. Her thesis ‘The Colours of Martinique: The (re)making of the modern Subject in French-Caribbean Art, 1847-1930’ focuses on visual representations of race and ecology made in Martinique as vital sites in which French national identity was negotiated in the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, a period in which the definition of being, and not being, French was redefined. It looks at understudied visual material of lesser-known or completely unknown, sometimes ‘amateur’, artists alongside work of a canonical artist like Paul Gauguin.

By looking at such artists in a relational, non-hierarchical way, Helena’s research navigates the multitude of chromatic explorations done to grapple and reassert racial and environmental control of Martinique in the decades following the 1848 abolition of slavery. The thesis uses colour (as a pigment, a racial marker and visual effect) as the main prism through which engage with the work and the questions they ask.

John Marshall is an RHS Centenary Fellow, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. John is a fourth year PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, having previously obtained a BA and MA from Dublin City University.

John’s research analyses transnational lordship and politics in thirteenth-century Britain and Ireland. John’s thesis focuses on the Marshal earls of Pembroke and lords of Leinster, in particular how their influence on the ‘peripheries’ of the Plantagenet empire in Ireland and Wales brought them influence and patronage at the core. His thesis will also provide the first edition of the partition of the Marshal estates in 1247 after the male line of the family died out.

In addition to his membership with the RHS, John is also an associate member of the AHRC-funded Noblesse Oblige research network and has published on aspects of his research in History: The Journal of the Historical Association (108:382) and Irish Historical Studies (2023).

Stefano Nicastro is an RHS Marshall Fellow, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Stefano studied History at the University of Milan and spent a semester abroad in Istanbul at the Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi via the Erasmus programme. Subsequently, he completed an MSc in Middle Eastern Studies with Arabic at the University of Edinburgh and I further studied Arabic in Egypt at the International House Cairo – ILI.

Stefano is currently a History PhD Student at the University of Edinburgh, working on a thesis entitled, ‘Genoa in the Islamicate Mediterranean: Diplomatic and Economic Relationships between the Genoese and the Qalawunid Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, 1279-1382′. Stefano’s research looks at cross-cultural and trans-regional interactions in the Mediterranean during the later Middle Ages. Specifically, it studies the diplomatic and commercial relationships between the commune of Genoa and the Mamluk sultanate with a focus on the practices and the modality of these trans-Mediterranean exchanges.

HEADER IMAGE: University College London: the main buildings seen from Gower Street. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, public domain

Panel Discussion

17:00 BST, Tuesday 13 June 2023, Online 

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Speakers at the event

• Dr Heather Cateau (University of the West Indies and University of St Andrews)
• Dr Stephen Mullen (University of Glasgow)
• Professor Harvey Neptune (Temple University)
• Professor Meleisa Ono-George (University of Oxford)
• Professor Matthew J. Smith (University College London, and chair)

About the event

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) remains a powerful, provocative and influential work of historical scholarship. For Williams, chattel slavery provided Britain with the capacity to develop commercial and industrial capitalism, and—in turn—the means to power an eighteenth-century industrial revolution. As the profits of slavery declined, Williams argued, so did British commitment to the slave trade—the motivations for abolition of the slave trade (1807) and of slavery (1834) being economic rather than humanitarian.

In this international panel, historians working in the fields of eighteenth-century Caribbean slavery and slave economy, and Anglo-Caribbean society, come together to consider the debates and legacies of Capitalism and Slavery. First published in the UK by André Deutsch in 1964, Williams’ classic text — ‘perhaps the most influential book written in the twentieth century on the history of slavery (Oxford DNB) — is gaining a new readership following its republication as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2022.

Panellists will introduce, and set in context, the scholarly and political work of Eric Williams (1911-1981), as well as review nearly 80 years of responses to Capitalism and Slavery. Our panel considers the value and contribution of the ‘Williams’ thesis’ in contemporary scholarship. Speakers will also offer their perspectives on future research directions for histories of slavery and the slave economy, as well as the social and economic history of the Caribbean, in the long eighteenth century.

About our panellists

• Heather Cateau is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the West Indies where she teaches Caribbean history, economic history, and Caribbean historiography. Heather is a specialist in the study of plantation systems and comparative systems of enslavement. Her books include Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later (2000, with Selwyn Carrington); History of the Caribbean in the Atlantic World (2005, with John Campbell), and Beyond Tradition: Reinterpreting the Caribbean Historical Experience (2006, with Rita Pemberton). From 2023 Heather is a Senior Research Fellow in the History department at the University of St Andrews.
• Stephen Mullen teaches History at the University of Glasgow and is the author of The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy. Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775-1838, published in November 2022, which considers the Williams’ thesis in a Scottish context. Stephen’s other publications include the reports Glasgow, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: an Audit of Historic Connections and Modern Legacies (2022, for Glasgow City Council) and Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow (2018, with Simon Newman).
• Harvey R. Neptune is Professor of History at Temple University, Philadelphia, specialising in the post-emancipation history of the Caribbean. Harvey’s publications include Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the US Occupation (2007) and ‘Throwin’ Scholarly Shade: Eric Williams in the New Histories of Capitalism and Slavery’, Journal of the Early Republic (2019).
• Meleisa Ono-George is Associate Professor and Brittenden Fellow in Black British History at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. A social-cultural historian of race and gender, Meleisa’s research and publications consider Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean from the late eighteenth century.
• Matthew J. Smith is is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. A specialist in the history of Haiti and Jamaica, Matthew’s recent publications include The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture Politics co-edited with Diana Paton (2021) and Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (2014).

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More on the Royal Historical Society’s events programme, 2023 >

‘Decolonising the History of Internationalism’

Dr Su Lin Lewis

(University of Bristol)

Friday 16 September 2022

18.00 BST – University College London & Live-streamed

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Abstract

The history of internationalism has tended to focus on power centres in the Global North – London, Geneva, New York, and Paris – and institutions like the League of Nations, United Nations, and UNESCO.  What happens when we flip our perspective, and view internationalism from the point of view of the decolonising South? What do we get when we shift our focus from world leaders to the internationalism of activists, intellectuals, feminists, poets, artists, rebels, and insurgents operating in Asia and Africa?

Moreover, how are our methods of researching and debating international history – in universities, archives, and conferences in the Global North – structured by economic inequalities, colonial legacies, and visa regimes that limit participation from scholars from the South?

This lecture considers how we might decolonise both the content and the methods of international history, focusing especially on leftist internationalism in the Afro-Asian world.

Speaker biography

Dr Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor in Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. She works on the social history of globalisation, including cosmopolitan port-cities, transnational activist movements, and post-colonial internationalism, with a focus on modern Southeast Asia.

Su Lin’s monograph, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) won the Urban History Association’s Prize for Best Book (Non-North America) for 2015-16. She co-led an AHRC-funded research network on ‘Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War’ and is currently an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow investigating Socialist Internationalism in the Afro-Asian World.

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RHS Lecture and Events: Full Programme for 2022 >