RHS Prothero Lecture with Peter Frankopan

8 July 2024

About the event

The 2024 Prothero Lecture, given by Peter Frankopan (Oxford), was on the theme ‘On the Challenges and Purposes of Global History’.  Peter asked what is global history; should historians think globally – and is it even possible to do so? How does macro-history fit alongside microhistories and regional and periodic specialisations; and what do these questions mean for the teaching of history at school and university?

The RHS Prothero Lecture was followed, from 8.00pm, by the Society’s Annual Summer Party at Mary Ward House.

About the speaker

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is also Professor of Silk Roads Studies and a Bye-Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.

Peter is co-host of a new podcast produced by Goalhanger Productions and Wondery alongside Afua Hirsch called Legacy. Launched at the end of 2023, Legacy looks at the lives of some of the extraordinary men and women who have ever lived – and ask whether they have the reputations they deserve.

His publications includeThe Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015)The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World (2018) and The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (2023). Silk Roads was named The Daily Telegraph‘s History Book of the Year 2015 and was lauded as one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-20 by the Sunday Times. His latest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, was named History Book of the Year by The Times in 2023. His books have have been translated into forty languages.

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