The Royal Historical Society offers two annual PhD Fellowships for postgraduate historians in their third year of research at a university in the UK or overseas in order to complete a doctorate. The Fellowships comprise:
- Two RHS Centenary Fellowships: each Fellowship runs for 6-months and is worth £8,500* for final-year PhD students to complete their dissertations and to develop their research career.
*In the academic year 2027-28, £8500 is the minimum stipend to be paid. The IHR is currently undertaking a review to increase this and this page will be updated if a new rate is agreed.
The Fellowships are intended as writing-up awards for those who can make a clear argument about the need for additional time beyond the three years of doctoral study (or equivalent in the case of part-time or international students with longer programmes of study). They will be awarded to doctoral students who are engaged in the completion of a doctorate in history (broadly defined), on topics from 300AD to the present day.
Applicants must have completed at least three years of full-time or four years of part-time research on their doctoral programme (and not more than four years’ full-time or six years’ part-time) at the beginning of the academic year in which the awards will be held. Adjustments to these timings will be made for international degrees, which may be longer in duration.
All Fellowships are open to candidates without regard to nationality or academic affiliation. They are jointly held with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London, where Fellows are based.
Further details about the 2027-28 Doctoral Fellowships, including eligibility, are available via the Institute of Historical Research.
Applications for the academic year 2027-28
Applications for the Society’s two PhD Fellowships, held at the Institute of Historical Research, are now open. This current call for applications runs from 15 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.
Further information on the 2027-28 round of Fellowships, with details of how to submit an application, is available from the Institute of Historical Research.
Applications must be made via the applications portal of the Institute of Historical Research.
Centenary Fellows, 2026-27
The Society is delighted to support two PhD Fellows to complete their doctorates in the academic year 2026-27.
Isla Cartney an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2026-27, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
‘The Royal Household Stewards of Henry III (1216-1272)’
Isla is a fourth-year PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia, supervised by Professor Nicholas Vincent. She previously completed an MA at the University of St. Andrews and an MPhil at the University of Cambridge.
Isla’s research provides a prosopographical study of the English courtiers during the reign of Henry III. In 1258, Henry was overthrown by a group of magnates and subjected to conciliar control, in what is termed England’s first revolution. One of the key reasons cited in Henry’s
removal from power was the dominance of foreign courtiers in English politics. These complaints have led historians to focus upon the alien courtiers, leaving the English virtually unexplored. The thesis intends to rectify this.
Through a computer-based analysis of Henry III’s charter witness lists, the project reconstructs the membership of Henry’s court. Using extensive government records, legal records, and unpublished charter evidence, the project analyses the lives and careers of these men. This illuminates wider themes of social mobility, the development of royal courts, and the political issues of Henry’s reign.
Liudmila Lyagushkina is an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2026-27, held jointly with the Institute of Research, University of London.
‘From Arrest to Arrest: Experiences of the Re-Convicted Victims of Stalinist Terror in the USSR, 1929-1953’
Liudmila is a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, working at the intersection of Soviet history and digital humanities. She previously earned a Candidate of Sciences (pre-doctoral) degree from Moscow State University and a diploma in applied data analytics from the European University at Saint Petersburg.
Her PhD project examines the ‘repeaters’, those repeatedly arrested during Stalin’s rule, and addresses two major gaps in historiography. Quantitatively, it tackles inconsistencies in statistics on the victims of political repression caused by double counting of the same repeaters. Qualitatively, it recovers the lived experiences of returnees between arrests, a group whose survival strategies remain little understood, challenging assumptions about everyday life under authoritarian rule.
The project draws on a wide range of sources, spanning databases of victims of political repression with millions of entries, archival collections of thousands of investigative files, and personal accounts of the victims. Methodologically, Liudmila employs digital tools to link records about the same person, classify data into historically specific groups, and map where victims lived. Her project demonstrates how digital approaches, particularly AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), can be used as research assistants to historians.
HEADER IMAGE: University College London: the main buildings seen from Gower Street. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, public domain