This week the Society announced the Shortlists for its annual First Book and Early Career Article Prizes. The shortlists follow an open call for early career historians to self-nominate a first history monograph, published in 2025, or a journal article / essay published last year and written within three years of completion of a PhD.
The shortlists include eight titles each, selected by the Society’s judging panels from longlists drawn up in March. Further details of the sixteen books and articles included are available via the links below.
- Royal Historical Society First Book Prize Shortlist, 2026
- Royal Historical Society Early Career Article Prize Shortlist, 2026
Two final winners will be chosen from each category in June, with announcement of this year’s four recipients to be made in early July.
In 2025, the Society’s book and article prizes were awarded to:
First Book Prize
- Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
- Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948, by Jules Skotnes-Brown (Johns Hopkins University Press 2024)
Early Career Article Prize
- William Jones, “You are going to be my Bettman”: Exploitative Sexual Relationships and the Lives of the Pipels in Nazi Concentration Camps’, published in The Journal of Holocaust Research (2024)
- Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, published in History Workshop Journal (2024)
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