The Royal Historical Society offers 4 annual PhD Fellowships for postgraduate historians in their third year of research at a university in the UK or overseas. The Fellowships comprise:
- Two RHS Centenary Fellowships: each Centenary Fellowship runs for 6-months and is worth £8,295 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 £8,295 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 (IHR), University of London, where Fellows are based.
How to Apply for 2025-26
- Applications for Marshall and Centenary Fellowships for the academic year 2024-25 have now closed. Details of the next call, for the academic year 2025-26, will be announced in Spring 2025.
- 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’s Doctoral Fellowships page.
Centenary and Marshall Fellows, 2024-25
Eve Pennington, is an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2024-25, held jointly with the Institute of Research, University of London.
‘Women, the built environment, and life narratives: reconstructing the relationship between gender and state-led urban development through the new towns in North-West England, c.1961-1989’
Eve is a RHS Centenary Fellow held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Eve is a fourth-year PhD researcher supervised by Charlotte Wildman and Penny Summerfield at the University of Manchester, where she previously completed her BA and MA in History.
Eve’s doctoral thesis interrogates the relationship between gender and state-led urban development in late-twentieth-century Britain, exploring the ways that women’s subjectivities and cultural constructions of femininity were produced in tandem with built environments like housing estates, workplaces, and transport networks. It focuses on three new towns established in north-west England during the 1960s and 1970s (Skelmersdale, Runcorn, and Central Lancashire) and analyses archival material produced by local policymakers and urban planners, as well as original oral history interviews conducted with women who moved to the towns during the late twentieth century.
Eve’s research sits at the intersection between urban history and women’s history, examining the ways that built environments reflected and reinforced gender relations, and reconstructing women’s agency to challenge inequalities through their use of urban space. Her regional approach problematises narratives of deindustrialisation, urban decay, and unemployment, reframing northern England as a site of experimentation, investment, and renewal.
Alexandra Plane is an RHS Centenary Fellow, 2024-25, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
‘Reconstructing the Scottish and English Libraries of King James VI and I’
Alexandra is a librarian and doctoral student co-supervised at Newcastle University and the National Library of Scotland through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. She previously completed a BA and MA in Classics at the University of Durham, as well as an MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL.
Her doctoral research seeks to reconstruct the Scottish and English libraries of King James VI and I. Despite King James’s significance for intellectual, political, religious and cultural history, at present very little is known about his libraries. This project employs a combination of traditional scholarship and newer digital approaches to remedy this, making it possible to better understand how Britain’s most scholarly monarch accessed and circulated knowledge and ideas. It sheds new light on James as an author and king who was keenly aware of the power books held not only for learning, but also as gift objects and tools for royal image-building.
Rebecca Orr is an RHS Marshall Fellow, 2024-25, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
‘The Ex-Empire Builders: Migrants of Decolonisation and the Transformation of the Post-War Workplace’
Rebecca is a PhD researcher in History at the European University Institute. She previously studied for a BA in History at the University of Cambridge and an MA in Modern History at the University of Warwick. Before starting her PhD, she worked for two years as a research support assistant for the Global History of Capitalism project at the University of Oxford.
Her thesis, entitled ‘The Ex-Empire Builders: Migrants of Decolonisation and the Transformation of the Post-War Workplace’, looks at how formal decolonisation resulted in the emergence of new types of professional work and workplace in post-war Britain and its former colonies. Highlighting the interconnection between work and migration, her research explores the constitutive role played by former colonial civil servants in three workplaces on the rise: private security, universities and charitable organisations. The thesis relates broader structural changes to the intimate and familial. Drawing upon oral history interviews with the children of colonialists and settlers, the research explores how the economic consequences of formal decolonisation registered at the level of the state, family, and individual.
Rebecca Tyson is an RHS Marshall Fellow, 2024-25, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
‘Sailing to Conquest: Maritime Activity and Identity in Eleventh-Century Normandy’
Rebecca’s doctoral research provides a hitherto largely uncharted maritime context for the Norman invasion of England, by looking back at the earlier eleventh century in Normandy to explore where the maritime knowledge, experience, and ships may have been found for Duke William to draw upon in the early months of 1066. To date, studies of eleventh-century Normandy and the Norman invasion of England have consistently adopted a terrestrial perspective. In contrast, my research centres the understudied place of maritime activity in the century preceding the Norman cross-Channel invasion, offering for the first time a historical perspective recognising that Normandy’s coastline was a frontier as dynamic and significant as its land border.
This novel approach thereby not only provides much needed insight into a fundamental but critically overlooked aspect of the Norman invasion, but also demonstrates that, when Normandy’s earlier eleventh-century history is reconsidered from a non-terrestrial point of view and despite being overlooked as a maritime polity, there is a wide range of evidence that points to an active maritime tradition in Normandy in the century preceding 1066, that has wider implications for fully understanding the management of the resulting cross-Channel Anglo-Norman realm.
HEADER IMAGE: University College London: the main buildings seen from Gower Street. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, public domain