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 £7,863 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 £7,863 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.
Invitations for applications for the Fellowships for 2023-24 will be issued in Spring 2023 by the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research.
How to Apply for 2023-24
- 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, 2022-23
Sofya Anisimova is an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2022-23, held jointly with the Institute of Research, University of London.
Sofya is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of St Andrews. Her thesis titled ‘Russia’s Military Strategy and the Entente, 1914-1917’ looks at how the participation in a coalition with Britain and France affected the strategic planning of the Russian high command during the First World War. The nature of the warfare developed in 1914-1918 made it impossible for any country to withstand the pressure alone, so in order to win military commands had to adapt quickly to the new conditions and learn how to cooperate with their Allies, and Russian Empire was not the exception.
Studying the inter-Allied relations in detail and finally bringing Russia into the analysis of the Entente strategy helps us better grasp the challenges faced by coalitions in general. It also broadens our understanding of the geography of the Entente engagement during the war, and brings us closer to a more balanced view of the 1914-1918 conflict that includes not only the Western front but also Eastern, Balkan and Ottoman theatres of war.
Beckie Rutherford is an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2022-23, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Beckie’s six-month fellowship will run from October 2022 to March 2023.
As a Centenary Fellow, Beckie will complete her Warwick University PhD entitled ‘Disabled Women Organising: Rethinking Agency within British Liberation Movements, 1976-2000’. Beckie’s research illuminates the neglected histories of three grassroots disabled women’s groups, plus the pioneering work of disabled women artists and writers. Her thesis demonstrates the centrality of disabled women’s narratives to the broader landscape of liberation politics in modern Britain. It advocates a creative understanding of activist histories, accounting for the agency, and diversity uncovered within stories of disabled women organising.
Daniel Banks is an RHS Marshall Fellow, 2022-23, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Daniel’s work focuses on how a heterogeneous group of republican revolutionaries influenced the politics of nation-building and colonialism in the western Mediterranean from 1850 to 1875. By taking a sea-based approach, he brings together different national historiographies and argues for the relevance of previously overlooked actors. Daniel’s PhD research is based at the European University Institute, Florence.
Urvi Khaitan is an RHS Marshall Fellow, 2022-23, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Urvi’s Oxford University thesis — ‘Women and Work in the Indian Economy: Empire, Famine, and Labour during the Second World War’ — explores how women at the margins of colonial Indian society engaged with and experienced paid work. She investigates the ways in which lower-caste and Adivasi (indigenous) women in late colonial India negotiated a turbulent wartime economy in the eastern provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Assam during the Second World War. Constituting the bulk of the subcontinent’s female population — but peripheralized historically and historiographically not only by their gender but also by their caste, class, and location — non-elite women bore the brunt of economic shocks brought about by the war and the 1943 Bengal Famine. Economic displacement exacerbated precarity and intensified the intimate relationship between questions of work and questions of survival.
HEADER IMAGE: University College London: the main buildings seen from Gower Street. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, public domain