RHS Workshop Grants – new call now open

22 November 2023

The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce the next call for its RHS Workshop Grants for projects taking place in 2024. 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 held in 2024.

This is the second round of RHS Workshops Grants; further details of the four projects awarded funding in 2023 are listed below.

Applications are now invited via the Society’s online application portal, before the closing date: 23:59 on Friday 19 January 2024.

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 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 750-1,000 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 2024

Proposals should be submitted via the Society’s online application system by the deadline of 23:59 on Friday 19 January 2024.

 

Recipients of RHS Workshops Grants, 2023

The following four projects were awarded funding in the first round of Workshops held in 2023:

  • ‘Early Modern Error’ — lead organiser: Alice Leonard (Coventry)
  • ‘Women and Plantations: New Directions in Tudor and Stuart Colonial History’ — lead organiser: Lauren Working (York)
  • ‘Beyond the ‘Good’ / ’Bad’ Migrant Dichotomy: ways forward for early modern and contemporary history’ — lead organiser: Kathleen Commons (Sheffield)
  • ‘Unboxing the Family Archive: New Approaches to Intergenerational Collections’ — lead organiser: Imogen Peck (Birmingham)