RHS Workshop Grants – 2025 call now open to fund day event on historical projects

25 November 2024

The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the next call for its RHS Workshop Grants for projects to take place in 2025. This scheme provides funding of £1,000 per Grant to enable historians to undertake activities, broadly defined, to pursue historical research, study and discussion. In this round, the Society will make up to six awards for Workshops to be held in 2025.

Applications are now invited via the Society’s online application portal, before the closing date: 23:59 on Friday 24 January 2025. Applicants / lead organisers of a Workshop must be current Fellows or Members of the Society.

This is the third round of RHS Workshops Grants since the scheme began in 2023; further details of the projects awarded funding in 2024 are listed below.

About the Call

RHS Workshop Grants enable historians to come together to pursue projects of shared interest. Projects are purposefully and broadly defined, and may focus not only on academic research but also on a wider range of activities relating to historical work. These may include but are not limited to:  

  • discussion of a research topic or project by collaborators;  
  • evaluation of historical methodologies, theories or practice; 
  • workshopping and manuscript review of a proposed edited collection; 
  • beginning and testing a research idea, leading to a future project;  
  • piloting work relating to the teaching, research or the communication of history; 
  • planning and writing a funding proposal;  
  • undertaking networking and building of academic communities; 
  • activities that combine, where appropriate, historians from a range of professional and other backgrounds, including higher education, related sectors of the historical professional, and community history groups. 
  • Workshops may be open to an audience or closed to invited attendees according to the organisers’ preference.

The Society is particularly keen to support activities for which alternative sources of funding are very limited, or do not exist. The Society seeks to provide grants to those in greatest need of funding, where options for institutional support are minimal or not available.  

Each Workshop receives £1,000 from the Royal Historical Society to cover attendance and the costs of a day meeting. In this round the Society looks to provide up to six projects with Grant funding.

Workshops will be supported by the Royal Historical Society, with updates on outcomes reported via the RHS blog and social media. Projects leading to publishable work are warmly encouraged to submit content to the Society’s journal, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, for consideration.

Applicants are welcome to consider hosting Workshops at the Society’s offices at University College London, if desirable.

Eligibility

The Society looks to award up to six Grants to projects in this latest round. Eligible applications will be for projects that: 

  • have applicants / lead organisers who are current Fellows or members of the Society. For more on how to join the Society, please see here;
  • request funds to support travel, venue hire, hospitality and overnight accommodation when required, as well as travel bursaries for public events; grants will not be awarded to support paid work; 
  • may include participants travelling from Europe in line with the Society’s carbon policy; attendance by participants from further afield will not be supported by the grant; 
  • remain in contact with the Society before and after the Workshop and agree to contribute an article on their project to the RHS blog, where appropriate. 

How to apply

If you have an idea for a workshop and would like to submit a proposal, please provide a 750 to 1,000 word statement. This should outline:

  • the academic focus of the Workshop and the topic / activity under consideration
  • the purpose and proposed outcome from the Workshop
  • costings for holding a one-day event
  • the location of the proposed Workshop, and whether this may be the RHS Office at University College London
  • the lead organiser(s) and proposed participants who would be involved in the Workshop
  • the proposed date of the Workshop, to be held in 2025

Proposals should be submitted via the Society’s online application platform by the deadline of 23:59 on Friday 24 January 2025.

Recipients of RHS Workshops Grants, 2024

The following six projects were awarded funding in the second round of Workshops announced in 2024:

  • Arunima Datta (University of North Texas) for ‘(Re)Visioning London through “Black” Dialogues’
  • Helen Glew (University of Westminster) for ‘Pat Thane: Reflections on History, Policy and Action’
  • Elizabeth Goodwin (York St John University) for a ‘Network Building Symposium for Historians in Post 92 Institutions’
  • Claire Kennan (King’s College, London) for ‘A Workshop in Ruins’
  • Aparajita Mukhopadhyay (University of Kent) for ‘Mobilising Imperial History: Crime, Policing and Control in the British Empire’
  • Jamie Wood and Graham Barrett (University of Lincoln) for ‘Present and Precedent in the Church Councils of Late Antique Iberia’