RHS Panel Grants support the formation of panels to present, in-person, research on a shared historical theme at an academic conference, or equivalent event, in history or a cognate discipline. Launched in 2025, this is the first year of a new programme which is generously supported by the Scouloudi Foundation.

About the Panel Grants programme

The scheme will support the creation of panels, of up to four principal participants, whose formation would not otherwise have been possible, in their entirety, due to an absence of financial support. 

In establishing this programme, the Society seeks to make possible collaborative conference participation and research dissemination at a time when budgets for event attendance and travel have been cut. The scheme also aims to support panel membership by independent historians with no access to funding for conference participation.

The Society expects to make up to two awards, of £1500 per panel, in this first round of Scouloudi Panel Grants to enable attendance at conferences between 1 September 2025 and 31 July 2026.

Applications for this award, 2025-26, closed on Friday 23 May.

Grants support historians to form panels to present historical work, in-person, on a shared theme, at a specific conference or equivalent. Funding of £1500 per panel will be made available to support the following costs associated with the creation of and presentation by a panel:

• conference or event attendance fees;
• travel to the conference, in line with the Society’s expenses and carbon policy;
• accommodation, if required, and reasonable expenses for the duration of the conference.

The venue of the specified conference will depend on the location of panel members. However, the extent of funding available means grants will most likely be given for panels taking place in a home country or a close neighbouring country: for example, for UK applicants this will most likely mean attendance at an event in the United Kingdom or Europe.

Eligibility and making an application for a Panel Grant, 2025-26

Applications are invited for panels that address a coherent and common subject area, relating (but not limited) to:

• any historical topic or question, not limited by chronology or geography
• historical methodologies and practice;
• approaches to historical study and its promotion, e.g. public history, work by historians across professional sectors, interdisciplinary working with other practitioners in the arts, humanities, social sciences and/or STEM;
• teaching and/or the communication of history;
• analysis of and advocacy for the historical discipline and profession in higher education or other sectors.

Grants are available to historians those who are:

• at any career stage, from advanced PhD onwards;
• working either in higher education or as a professional historian in a related sector, e.g. museums, archives, heritage or broadcasting;
• engaged in scholarly research as an independent historian.

Successful panel applications will:

• comprise between three and four principal participants (independent of a chair) of whom at least one panellist (as lead applicant) will be a current Fellow or Member of the Royal Historical Society;
• involve speakers from at least two different institutions or organisations, where applicable;
• combine speakers at a range of career stages and backgrounds, including at least one early career historian (current completing or within five years of completion of a PhD);
• seek to bring into dialogue practitioners from a range of backgrounds: e.g. higher education; museum, archives and heritage; schools; and public or community history groups;
• be able to demonstrate the need for RHS funding to establish the panel due to the absence of alternative financial support;
• undertake a panel at a recognised academic conference held between 1 September 2025 and 31 July 2026;
• promote their panel as supported by the award of a ‘Scouloudi Panel Grant from by Royal Historical Society’;
• provide a short report for the Society on the panel as a collaborative exercise and its contribution to historical understanding, knowledge and/or practice, of value to others;
• will receive an initial provisional award, followed by the transfer of funds on confirmation that their panel has been accepted by the conference (if confirmation is not possible by the date of this programme’s close and decision-making).

When awarding grants, primary consideration will be given to the proposed quality and value of the panel; the distinctiveness of a panel’s composition, drawing on historians’ varied affiliations within and beyond higher education; the suitability of a panel to the specified conference; and a demonstrable need for funding to facilitate the activity. 

In this and all similar awards, the Society is keen to support historians who lack access to alternative resources (institutional or other) to enhance their work, or where funding opportunities are very limited.

Applications must be submitted via the Society’s applications portal >

Questions about the Scouloudi Panel Grants, 2025-26, may be sent to: administration@royalhistsoc.org.

Until 31 December 2024, the Society was a partner in the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). The Bibliography is the most comprehensive and accurate guide available to what’s been published in British and Irish history over the past 100 years.

From January 2025, the Bibliography remains a research and publishing project of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London, and the Belgian publisher, Brepols. It is edited by staff at the Institute of Historical Research, with specialist academic advisers acting as section editors. 

From 2025, and with thanks to Brepols, Fellows and Members of the Society remain able to subscribe to the Bibliography at a significantly reduced rate. Those interested in taking up this RHS membership offer should contact: administration@royalhistsoc,org, marking their email ‘BBIH’.

From November 2024, the Bibliography has a new search interface, offering a new look to the resource. For more on this, please see here.

What does BBIH offer historians of Britain and the British world?

• contains 660,000+ records of books, edited collections, journal articles and book chapters;
• includes details of history publications from the early 1900s to the current year;
• adds regular online updates of c.10,000 new publications each year;
• covers the history of the British Isles, the former empire and Commonwealth, the British world, and Britons’ activities on the global stage, from Roman Britain to the 21st century;
• contains publications relating to British influence in Europe, the trans-Atlantic and informal empire;
• searchable via a range of options. These include: by author, title of publication, subject area, period and places covered, publication type and date/s of publication;
• offers cross-searchability with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The National Register of Archives and IHR digital resources including ‘Reviews in History’ and British History Online.

What makes BBIH a key research tool?

• BBIH has been created using systematic and extensive surveys of data on all relevant new publications, including weekly reviews of 800 academic journals and records of new acquisitions by the British Library;
• Provides links to individual publications in your library or a union catalogue, along with links to Google Books, selected on-line book reviews, and full text versions of articles;
• BBIH enables you to create your own comprehensive bibliography on any topic, using a range of a variety export formats (including Refworks and EndNote);
• Generates email updates of new publications relevant to your research interests.

Access or subscribe to BBIH

The Bibliography of British and Irish History is an online subscription service that’s available via a very wide range of UK higher education institutions and research libraries, as well as universities and libraries worldwide.

• For members of subscribing institutions, access is available either via your library’s website or via Brepols’ online portal website: www.brepolis.net;
• Institutions wishing to subscribe to BBIH can obtain a 30-day free trial period, along with a price quotation and details on a licence agreement. One-year trials are now also available with 50% discount; UK institutions are priced according to JISC bandings. For further information, please email: brepolis@brepols.net;
• Individual subscriptions to BBIH are also available, with significant discounts for Fellows and Members of the RHS. For further enquiries, please email: administration@royalhistsoc.org.

For further information about the Bibliography and its use in research and teaching, see the BBIH pages on the IHR website.

The Royal Historical Society (RHS) is delighted to announce that Adam Matthew Digital (AM) has generously agreed to award the Society 200 twelve-month subscriptions to its digitised collections of primary sources. These licenses will be made available free-of-charge to early career researchers (ECRs) based at UK universities for their doctorate.  This agreement will significantly enhance the access of ECR historians to digital primary materials during the dislocations, travel restrictions and archive and library closures that are necessitated by the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. You can find out more about the scheme’s launch on the RHS blog.

How do I apply?

The 200 free subscriptions will be allocated by the RHS in 3 successive tranches, with deadlines in late May, June and July 2020.

While we do not have a precedent to gauge potential demand, we expect the number of eligible and worthy applications to be considerably higher than the number of available subscriptions. Allocation will accordingly be phased over a 3-month period and undertaken by a 3-fold process:

• determination of applicants’ eligibility;
• assessment of eligible applicants’ relative need for the Adam Matthew Digital Collections to advance their research; and
• in the event that demand exceeds supply, awards will be made by a lottery of eligible applicants who demonstrate substantial need. Please see the Q&A below for more information.

Applications for a RHS Adam Matthew Digital Collections Subscription must be made using the online application form. Please note that you can access the application form through the Research/Conference Grants program within the RHS applications portal.

Prospective applicants should:

• Check their eligibility against the criteria detailed below;
• If eligible to apply, explore the Adam Matthew Digital Collections to identify which if any materials are substantially relevant for your research project. The 200 twelve-month subscriptions Adam Matthew has kindly allocated to the RHS include not only the 8 million+ pages of primary source material in the Research Source Platform, but also over 70 thematic collections made available through 2019.
• Having confirmed both eligibility and the need for/utility of the Adam Matthew Digital Collections for your research, make an online application by any one of the 3 stated deadlines.
• Please note that (unless you specify otherwise) if your application in Round 1 is unsuccessful, but deemed by the RHS assessors to be both eligible and to demonstrate substantial need/utility with respect to the Adam Matthew Digital Collections, it will be resubmitted automatically by RHS for Rounds 2 and 3.  Likewise, eligible applications that demonstrate substantial need/utility which are initially submitted in Round 2 will automatically be resubmitted by RHS for Round 3.

Who is eligible to apply?

Two categories of History ECRs are eligible to apply:

• Those registered for a PhD/DPhil or an MPhil in a historical subject at a UK institution. Registration may be full-time or part-time.
• Those within two years (at the time of the application) of receiving their doctorate from a UK institution, and who are not yet in full-time employment. Please note the two years does not include any periods of maternity or paternity leave. Please detail this in the ‘any other information’ section of your application form.

Questions and Answers:

• Do I need to be physically-based in the UK at the time of my application?
  •   We understand that international and other eligible ECRs may be resident outside the UK at the time of their application.  If you are/were registered for a doctoral degree at a UK university (for PhD/DPhil students) OR would normally be resident in the UK as of March 2020 (for postdoctoral ECRs) your current place of residence need not be within the UK.
• Can I share my Adam Matthew Digital subscription with other students or researchers?
  • Your subscription is awarded solely for your personal research use. The application form includes a fair use declaration to which you agree to adhere in applying for this scheme.
• Why is the RHS using a lottery as part of its allocation process?
  • Allocation of research resources by lottery is a mechanism that is currently being tested internationally where demand exceeds supply. It arguably affords less scope for conscious or unconscious bias than conventional grant allocation systems.  In the current context, its benefits also include rapidity. It also takes into account the extent to which this scheme will entail work for Adam Matthew Digital and RHS staff already stretched by the demands of the COVID-19 crisis.  The RHS will employ this mechanism, after preliminary peer-review assessments of eligibility and need/utility, in the event that more ECRs apply than can be accommodated by this scheme.
• Do I need to provide a post-award report to the RHS and/or to Adam Matthew Digital?
  • Successful applicants will be asked to provide a short report on the uses to which the grant has been put and the outcome in terms of contribution to the progress of their research following the end of the subscription.
• If I receive a RHS Adam Matthew Digital Collections Subscription will my eligibility to apply in future for standard RHS funding (for research trips or conferences) be affected?
  • No. Receipt of a subscription will not ‘count’ against your total eligibility (currently twice as a PhD student and once as a postdoctoral ECR) to receive awards from our standard funding schemes.
• Do I need to acknowledge the support of Adam Matthew Digital and/or the RHS in my dissertation and/or subsequent publications?
  • Please use the following credit line in any research outputs that benefit from the subscription: ‘Research for this article/blog/dissertation/book was supported by the award of a Royal Historical Society Adam Matthew Digital subscription in 2020.’

Contact Us

All enquiries should be sent to Imogen Evans, RHS Administrative Secretary at adminsecretary@royalhistsoc.org.