On Wednesday 3 July the Society hosted its annual Prothero Lecture, given this year by Peter Frankopan (University of Oxford).
Peter spoke ‘On the Challenges and Purposes of Global History’, highlighting the capacity of global study to disrupt engrained perspectives on the chronologies, language and narratives of the past. As a historical approach that purposefully defies easy categorisation, global history poses challenges for its historians, especially recent graduates seeking a career in academic History. Peter’s lecture also called for greater support for, and appreciation of, the skills necessary to study the global past.
The 2024 Prothero Lecture was followed by the Society’s annual summer party, and was held at Mary Ward House, London.
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. His publications include The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (2023).
The Prothero Lecture, one of the highlights of the Royal Historical Society’s events programme, was first given in 1969 and is named for George W. Prothero (1848-1922), historian and President of the Society between 1901 and 1905. Previous Prothero Lecturers include Samuel H. Beer, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Quentin Skinner, Brenda E. Stevenson, and Keith Thomas.
Our thanks to Peter for the 2024 Prothero Lecture and to all those who attended this year’s lecture at Mary Ward House and online.
Our next event — ‘AI, History and Historians. A Panel Discussion’ — takes place at 2pm BST on Wednesday 17 July 2024 and considers the implications of GenAI technologies for the teaching and research of History in Higher Education. This event will be place online, with panellists:
- Jane Winters (chair): Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Vice-President, Publications, for the Royal Historical Society.
- Helen Hastie: Professor of Human-Robot Interaction at the University of Edinburgh and Head of School of Informatics.
- Matthew L. Jones: the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University and author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present (2023).
- Anna-Maria Sichani: Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Booking for this event is available and all are welcome.