The Society is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Harshan Kumarasingham and Dr Kate Smith as the new Editors for its academic journal, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Dr Kumarasingham and Dr Smith will lead Transactions in the next important phase of the journal’s development. The appointments will take effect from January 2022, 150 years after the journal’s first publication in 1872.
Dr Harshan Kumarasingham is Senior Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Edinburgh with expertise in modern British, Imperial and Commonwealth history, especially in regard to the fields of politics, constitutions, area studies, and decolonisation.
Harshan’s publications include A Political Legacy of the British Empire. Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka (2013), The Rise of Labour and the Fall of Empire – The Memoirs of William Hare, Fifth Earl of Listowel (2019), as part of the Society’s Camden Series, and the edited collection, Viceregalism. The Crown as Head of State in Political Crises in the Postwar Commonwealth (2020). Harshan is currently co-editing The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom.
I am delighted to be taking on the role of co-Editor of the Transactions in its 150th year and look forward to working with Kate and the RHS in this exciting new stage of its development.
Dr Kate Smith is Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Birmingham, with research expertise in early modern material culture, gender and the cultural practice of empire.
Kate’s publications include Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (2014) and the co-edited collections, New Pathways to Public Histories (2015) and The East India Company at Home (2018). Her current project is a monograph entitled Losing Possession in the Long Eighteenth Century which explores people’s experience of the loss of movable forms of property.
Kate is also Director of the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures which encourages interdisciplinary conversations about cultures past and present and champions the value of humanities research in universities and beyond.
I am very pleased to be appointed editor of Transactions and look forward to working with Harshan and the editorial board to amplify new voices and exciting research within the journal.
About Transactions
Transactions is the flagship academic journal of the Royal Historical Society. First published in 1872, Transactions has been publishing the highest quality scholarship in history for 150 years.
The journal welcomes submissions dealing with any geographical area from the early middle ages to the very recent past, and is interested in articles that cover entirely new ground, thematically or methodologically, as well as those that engage critically on established themes in existing literatures.
Under its new editorial team of Kate and Harshan, Transactions from 2022 will broaden the range of article formats and the subject areas it covers, including studies in historical methodologies, pedagogies and policy debates. The journal will also adopt a pre-print publishing model, a new paperback design and more frequent issues. In this way Transactions will better reflect the interests of the RHS as a learned society with a membership from within and beyond higher education.
The Transactions has been in near continuous publication since the 1870s and is one of the oldest history journals in the English-speaking world. Opening the pages of the Society’s journal to articles, and other new formats, from all historians marks an important new phase in its distinguished history.
Harshan and Kate each bring great experience in research and editing, across a wide range of national and global historical topics, within and beyond academia. We’re delighted they will be leading the journal’s development from the start of 2022. They look forward to receiving submissions relating to historical research and practice, by historians at all career stages, from a wide range of backgrounds.
Professor Emma Griffin, President, RHS
Submitting an article to Transactions
Since 2021 Transactions, published by Cambridge University Press, has welcomed proposals from all historians — not just (as previously) those who gave lectures to the Society.
If you are currently working on a research article, please consider Transactions as one of the journals in which to publish your work. If you wish to submit an article, please read our Guidelines for Authors which provide information on the journal and the format in which to offer your research.
For enquiries regarding submissions to Transactions, please email: trhs@royalhistsoc.org.
You can find more on Transactions and its future in the latest issue of the Society’s Newsletter (November 2021). The latest volume of Transactions (31 in the Sixth Series) was published in November 2021.