On Friday 24 November the Royal Historical Society held its Anniversary General Meeting (AGM) at Mary Ward House, London. The AGM was followed by the 2023 Presidential Lecture, ‘European Exploration, Empires, and the Making of the Modern World’, given by the Society’s President, Professor Emma Griffin (Queen Mary University of London).

The AGM saw the appointment of following to the Society’s governing Council: Professor Clare Griffiths (Cardiff) as Vice President; Dr John Law as Treasurer; Professor Barbara Bombi (Kent) as Secretary for Research; Professors Mark Knights (Warwick) and Iftikhar Malik (Bath Spa University) as members of Council.

The meeting also noted the departure from the RHS Council of the following, on completion of their terms of office: Professor Jonathan Morris (Hertfordshire) as Vice-President (Research Policy); Professor Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan) as Honorary Treasurer; Professor Julian Wright (Northumbria) as Secretary for Professional Engagement; and Professor Thomas Otte (UEA) as a member of Council.

In her 2023 Presidential Lecture, Professor Griffin considered British industrialisation in global and European perspective. The lecture compared approaches to innovation and the handling of raw materials, sourced in colonial territories, in Britain and France, tracing the origins of English entrepreneurialism to the early modern period.

Our thanks to all those who attended the event in person and online. A video and audio recording of the lecture will be made available shortly.

The Society’s Events Archive includes video and audio recordings of recent lectures and panel discussions hosted by the RHS. Now available to watch or listen again are recordings of the following sessions held in autumn 2023.

Further below you’ll find details of opening events in our 2024 programme which begins on 23 January with the inaugural RHS / German Historical Institute Lecture on Global History.

RHS Presidential Lecture, 2023 

‘European Exploration, Empires, and the Making of the Modern World’, with Emma Griffin (24 November)

RHS Public History Lecture, in association with Gresham College

‘Pilgrimages, Pandemics and the Past’, with Tom Holland (7 November)

RHS Panel: ‘Black British History. Where Now, Why Next?

with Hannah Elias, Kesewa John, Liam Liburd and Bill Schwarz (24 October)

RHS Panel: ‘Writing and Publishing Trade History’, in association with Yale University Press (10 October)

with Rebecca Clifford, Robert Gildea, Heather McCallum, James Pullen, Simon Winder and Emma Griffin

RHS Lecture: ‘Migrant Voices in the Multilingual City’, with John Gallagher (15 September)

RHS Sponsored Lecture, with the Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Kent

‘The Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved African People and the Emergence of New Relationships between State and Commerce in Restoration in England’, with William Pettigrew (11 September)

What’s coming up in 2024?

We look forward to welcoming you to our events in 2024. In January and February we host lectures and discussions with:

• Clare Anderson on ‘Convicts, Creolization and Cosmopolitanism: aftermaths of penal transportation in the British Empire’ – the inaugural Royal Historical Society / German Historical Institute Lecture on Global History, at the GHIL and Online (5.30pm, Tuesday 23 January 2024)
• Levi Roach on ‘Charting Authority after Empire: Documentary Culture and Political Legitimacy in Post-Carolingian Europe’ – the first of 2024’s RHS Lectures, at Mary Ward House, London, and Online (6pm, Thursday 1 February 2024)
• Greg Jenner in conversation with Emma Griffin on ‘Finding the Funny in Public History’, at Mary Ward House, London, and Online (6pm, Tuesday 20 February 2024)

Further details of these lectures and talks, and how to book, are available here, along with our 2024 programme of events to which we’ll be adding in the coming months.

From the end of August, we will be extending the range of benefits available to all Fellows and Members of the Royal Historical Society. These will be in addition to the current set of benefits available, by category, to Fellows, Associate Fellows, Members and Postgraduate Members.

The new benefits provide online access to the archives of RHS publications, and include:

• Online access to the current issue and searchable archive of the Society’s journal Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. The archive, available via CUP’s Cambridge Core platform, includes 144 volumes and more than 2200 articles, published between the journal’s foundation in 1872 and the early 2020s.
• Online access to all 325 volumes of the Society’s Camden Series of primary source materials, including the latest titles published in 2021 and 2022, again via CUP’s Core platform. Since 1838, the Camden Series has made primary records available in accessible scholarly editions, compiled and introduced by specialist historians. The Series is especially strong in material relating to British history, including the British Empire and Britons’ influence overseas.

Other benefits available from late August 2022:

• 30% discount on purchases of print copies of the Society’s New Historical Perspectives book series, offering monographs and essay collections, and produced in association with the Institute of Historical Research and University of London Press.
• 20% discount on print subscription to History Today, Britain’s leading history magazine (£52 per annum, usually £65 full price)
• 20% discount on online subscription to the archive of History Today (£56 per annum, usually £70 full price).

Following requests from current Fellows, with the introduction of full online access we will also offer the option to ‘opt out’ of the annual print copy of Transactions, starting with the November 2022 volume.

Current Members of the Society will be notified in August when these benefits become available.

In the coming 12 months, the Society expects to offer further membership benefits, including:

• Access to a new ‘Fellows’ area’ on the Society’s website, providing curated content, a self-service membership subscription portal, and directory of Fellows’ research interests to enable scholarly exchange.
• Inclusion in and access to a directory of Fellows’ Research Interests.
• Additional discounts to partner publications and products. 

Applications to join the Royal Historical Society are welcome at any time. The next deadline for applications is Monday 22 August 2022.

The President and Council of the Royal Historical Society have today issued a statement on their concerns for History teaching and research in UK Higher Education.

Please see here to read the full statement: ‘History in UK Higher Education. A Statement from the Royal Historical Society’

The statement identifies an environment of ‘unprecedented turbulence and uncertainty’ in the sector, evident in several forms: closure of departments, programmes of voluntary and compulsory redundancy; cuts to courses; and the persistent threat of future actions of this kind. The statement also comments on the changing profile of ‘at risk’ departments. Many of those with whom the Society now works are in established universities with long-standing History departments noted for their achievement in recent REF exercises.

Explanations for the increase of at risk departments rest with political decisions — notably the lifting the student cap in 2015 — and the marketisation of UK Higher Education. The negative effects of these changes are now being felt particularly acutely by History and other humanities disciplines.

In the coming months, the Royal Historical Society is undertaking a project to assess the full extent of the losses, risks and concerns that now characterise History in UK Higher Education. We expect to published this report later this year.

History in UK Higher Education: A Statement from the Royal Historical Society >

If you wish to contact the Society on topics raised in today’s statement, in confidence, please email: president@royalhistsoc.org

The Society’s Toolkit for Historians provides further resources for those at risk of departmental cuts and closures.

The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the award of its Centenary and Marshall PhD Fellowships for 2023-24 to four postgraduate historians currently completing their dissertations at universities in the UK and Ireland.

The Fellowships, held at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), run for 6-months and enable holders to develop their research career.  

This year’s Centenary Fellows are Clare V. Church and John Marshall.

• Clare is completing her PhD at Aberystwyth University where her research focuses on the cultural representations of women celebrities, and their subsequent influence on gender roles and national morale in the UK, US, and France during the Second World War.
• John’s doctoral research at Trinity College Dublin considers transnational lordship and politics in thirteenth-century Britain and Ireland, specifically focusing on the Marshal earls of Pembroke and lords of Leinster. 

This year’s Marshall Fellows are Stefano Nicastro and Helena Neimann Erikstrup.

• Stefano’s research at the University of Edinburgh examines cross-cultural and trans-regional interactions in the Mediterranean during the later Middle Ages. 
• Helena’s thesis, at the University of Oxford, explores visual representations of race and ecology made in Martinique in the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. 

Further information on the work of the Society’s Centenary and Marshall Fellows, 2023-24 is available here.  

RHS Marshall Fellowships are supported by the generosity of Professor Peter Marshall FBA, President of the Royal Historical Society from 1996 to 2000. 

The call for Centenary and Marshall Fellowships for 2024-25 will open in Spring 2024.