Eight monographs and eight journal articles have been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Historical Society First Book and Early Career Article prizes.
The shortlists follow an open call for eligible books and articles, published in 2024. Two winners will be announced, in July, for each prize.
Winners of the First Book Prize will each receive £1000 while those for the Early Career Article prize receive £250. Our congratulations to all sixteen authors whose work has been shortlisted in 2025.
The eight monographs shortlisted for the First Book Prize are:
- Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press)
- Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age, by Simeon Koole (University of Chicago Press)
- Female Servants in Early Modern England, by Charmian Mansell (British Academy / Oxford University Press)
- The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838: Institutions and Trade during the First Globalization, by Juan Jose Rivas Moreno (Palgrave MacMillan)
- Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948, by Jules Skotnes-Brown (Johns Hopkins University Press)
- The Quislings. The Trials of Norwegian Wartime Collaborators, 1941–1964, by Anika Seemann (Cambridge University Press)
- Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century, by Fiona Smyth (Manchester University Press)
- Desire and Disunity: Christian Communities and Sexual Norms in the Late Antique West, by Ulriika Vihervalli (Liverpool University Press)
Further details of each monograph are available here.
The eight journal articles shortlisted for the Early Career Article Prize are:
- Beth Bhargava, ‘The National Front and Environmental Politics, 1967–90’, Modern British History
- James Burns, ‘The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West’, Journal of Late Antiquity
- Katherine Burns, ‘‘She died from grief’: Trauma and Emotion in Information Wanted Advertisements’, Slavery & Abolition
- Aisha Djelid, “The master whished to reproduce”: Slavery, Forced Intimacy, and Enslavers’ Interference in Sexual Relationships in the Antebellum South, 1808–1861′, American Nineteenth Century History
- William Jones, “You are going to be my Bettman”: Exploitative Sexual Relationships and the Lives of the Pipel in Nazi Concentration Camps’, The Journal of Holocaust Research
- Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, History Workshop Journal
- Matthew Lee, ‘Slavery, Colonialism and Civic Culture: The Development of Philanthropic Institutions in North East Scotland’, Northern Scotland
- Ollie Randall, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Further details of each article are available here.