Royal Historical Society
University College London, Gower Street, LONDON, WC1E 6BT
Prizes
The Royal Historical Society awards a number of prizes each year to recognize outstanding historical scholarship and achievement. The various awards embrace the whole range of the Society's engagement, and celebrate everything from the best performance by an 'A' level student to the best first book by an early career researcher.
The full list of awards is as follows. If you have any queries regarding prizes, please contact us
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2009 Awards The President anounced the winners of the Society's prizes for publication, and the winners of the Marshall and Centenary Fellowships, at a reception following the annual Prothero Lecture on Wednesday 30 June. Full details may be seen below.
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(From left to right: Maurizio Isabella (Gladstone proxime), Katharyna Ihnat (Centenary Fellow), Sandip Hazareesingh (David Berry), Alex Russell (Centenary Fellow), The President, Jan Machielsen (Marshall Fellow), Charlotte Panofre (IHR, Pollard Prize), Nick Draper (Whitfield Prize), George Molyneaux (Alexander Prize), Alice Rio (Gladstone Prize), Miles Taylor (Director, IHR)
The Alexander Prize
The Alexander Prize is awarded for a published scholarly journal article or an essay in a collective volume based upon original historical research. The value of the prize is £250 or a silver commemorative medal. The Prize has been reconfigured from 2006 to recognise and reward the research accomplishments of doctoral candidates and of early career historians. The Prize has also been altered from an award for unpublished research to an award in recognition of published scholarship.
Candidates must be doctoral students in History in a UK institution, or be within two years of having completed a doctorate in History in a UK institution. The article/essay submitted must have been published in a journal or edited collection during the period 1 January 2009 - 31 December 2009. In addition to the monetary prize, the winner will be invited to submit a further paper within nine months of the award for consideration by the Literary Directors, with a view to reading the paper before the Society and eventual publication in the Society's house journal Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Past Winners of the Alexander Prize
The Alexander Prize for 2009 was awarded to:
George Molyneaux (All Souls College, Oxford) for his article, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 1289–1323.
Judges’ citation:
George Molyneaux’s article subjects the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica to close scrutiny. By studying the strategies adopted by the translator, not least his numerous omissions or abbreviations, doubt is cast on the notion that the English were believed to be a single chosen people who enjoyed a special relationship with God. Learned, penetrating and unfailingly lucid, this is a highly impressive article. The author analyses with great skill a body of material that is diverse, fragmented and technically very difficult to master, expressing the fruits of his scholarship in a clear, elegant, narrative voice. His conclusions will contribute much to the debate about the nature and political significance of English consciousness in the ninth and tenth centuries.
The David Berry Prize
A prize of £250 will be awarded to the writer of the best essay on a subject, to be selected by the candidate, dealing with Scottish History, provided such a subject has been previously submitted to and approved by the Royal Historical Society. The essay submitted must be a genuine work of research based on original (manuscript or printed) materials. The essay should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length (excluding footnotes and appendices).
Past Winners of the David Berry Prize
The David Berry Prize for 2009 was awarded to:
Dr. Sandip Hazareesingh (The Open University) for his article ‘Interconnected synchronicities: the production of Glasgow and Bombay as modern global ports c. 1850 – 1880’, Journal of Global History, 4 (2009), pp. 7-31.
Judges’ citation:
The article critically examines the Cain/Hopkins proposition that
imperialism was focussed on the City of London, and suggests instead that imperial projects could involve 'a far wider range of networked commercial actors interacting with both the imperial and the colonial state'. It does so largely through a case-study of the port of Bombay, showing how a network of mainly Scots with Glaswegian connections tried to impose their model on India. It achieves its object convincingly, both at a theoretical and at an empirical level; it has impressive intellectual breadth, and it tackles something quite new in Scottish historical studies. It also provides a model example for further work on the Scottish contribution to the British Empire which deserves to be widely read.
The Frampton and Beazley Prizes
The Royal Historical Society awards annually a prize of £100 for the best performance in the History A-level examinations of each of the examining boards in the United Kingdom.
Frampton and Beazley Prize Winners 2009
Past Winners of the Frampton and Beazley Prizes
This Year's Prize Winners - to be announced Autumn 2010
The German History Society Essay Prize
The German History Society, in association with the Royal Historical Society, will award a prize of £500 to the winner of an essay competition. The essay can be on any aspect of German history, including the history of German-speaking people both within and beyond Europe. Any postgraduate registered for a degree in a university in either the United Kingdom or the Republic or Ireland is eligible to enter the competition. The text of the essay must not exceed 10,000 words.
Two hard copies of the essay must be submitted to the office of the Royal Historical Society, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT by 16 June 2010, together with details of the author's name, address (including e-mail address), institutional affiliation and degree registration.
German History Society Essay Prize Winner 2009
Past Winners of the German History Society Essay prize
The Gladstone History Book Prize
The Royal Historical Society offers an annual award of £1,000 for a history book published in Britain on any topic that is not primarily British history. To be eligible for the prize the book must be its author's first solely written book on a historical subject which is not primarily related to British history. The book must also be an original and scholarly work or historical research and have been published in English during the calendar year by a scholar normally resident in the United Kingdom.
Books are nominated by their publishers.
Further information and entry form
Previous Winners of the Gladstone Prize
The Gladstone Prize for 2009 was awarded to:
Dr. Alice Rio (King’s College, London) for Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages. Frankish Formulae, c.500-1000 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Judges’ citation:
This work is a formidable achievement on many levels. It is methodologically innovative, forging a new path for our understanding of early medieval Merovingian and Carolingian society. Written in a crisp and readable style, it adopts an engaging approach which renders its subject relevant for historians of any period. Drawing upon meticulous research in French, German, Italian and Latin, Alice Rio asks us to rethink the utility of a source often dismissed as unusable: legal formulae, the compilations made by scribes in which data about historical context were stripped out to create instructive case studies for contemporaries or later generations. While critiquing the way these sources were catalogued by nineteenth-century German scholars, Dr Rio provides an ambitious alternative methodology. She then demonstrates the rewards of a flexible approach, testing her theories in a case study of early medieval slavery or ‘unfreedom’. The judges felt that the book engaged with major historical questions and was also highly reflective about the practice of history as a whole. In short, it is a work which transcends its time period and offers salutary lessons for any historian.
The proxime accessit was:
Dr. Maurizio Isabella (Queen Mary, University of London) for Risorgimento in Exile. Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Judges’ citation:
This is an impressive case study of the intellectual development of Italian exiles in the period 1815-35, ambitiously placing them in a transnational, even world context. In the field of Risorgimento history, it breaks new ground in reassessing pre-Mazzini activism and its impact on later generations. In the field of post-Napoleonic Europe, it provides a methodology for exploring diverse aspects of the anti-Metternich discourse and how those strands were entwined together: it will be essential reading for historians of this period. Based on an impressive command of sources in French and Spanish (as well as the author’s native Italian) the work also has a broader resonance for any historian wishing to consider transnational intellectual currents, their possibilities and limits, and even offers lessons for the present-day European Union. The quality of writing and the breadth of research in this work make it a real scholarly achievement.
Rees Davies Prize
The Royal Historical Society has established a new graduate essay prize in memory of its former President and distinguished medieval scholar, Professor Sir Rees Davies (1938-2005).
The prise is open to all graduates who have been awarded grants to attend conferences under the Society's research support scheme. The prise will be publication of the essay in the following year's edition of the Society's pretigious journal Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, three year's free membership of the Royal Historical Society (which includes subscription to the Transactions) and a cash prize of £100.
Previous Winners of the Rees Davies Prize
Royal Historical Society / History Today Prize
This prize is intended to reward high-quality worl done by undergraduates in the dissertations that are now an integral part of most history courses. This prize is being jointly sponsored by the Society and by History Today, and is part of our close association with a magazine which does such invaluable service for the cause of history.
The potential entry for such a prize in any year is of course very large and to reduce numbers to manageable proportions for those who will assessing them it will be necessary to limit entries to one for every department in the United Kingdom. Accordingly history departments are invited to submit to the Society the name and home address of the candidate judged by the examiners to have presented the best dissertation, by 1 August 2010. The Society will then contact departmental nominees and invite them to enter the competition. The successful candidate will be awarded a prize of £250 and, at the discretion of the Editor of History Today, an article-length reduction of their dissertation will be published in a future issue of the magazine. The success of this venture depends very much on the willingness of departments to let us have th details of their best candidates in due course.
Royal Historical Society/History Scotland Prize
The Society has much pleasure in announcing a new prize intended to reward high-quality work done by undergraduates in dissertations on any aspect of Scottish history. This prize is being jointly sponsored by the Society and by History Scotland and represents a new partnership with a magazine which does invaluable service in promoting the cause of history. The potential entry for such a prize in any year is of course large and to reduce numbers to manageable proportions for those who will be assessing them it will be necessary to limit entries to one for every Higher Education institution in the United Kingdom.
Accordingly history departments are invited to submit to the Society by 1 August 2010 either a copy of the dissertation that they wish to nominate or the contact details of the candidate who would be able to supply such a copy. The successful candidate will be awarded a prize of £250 and, at the discretion of the Editor of History Scotland, his or her piece will be published in a future issue of the magazine.
Whitfield Book Prize
The Royal Historical Society annually offers the Whitfield prize (value £1,000) for a new book on British or Irish history. To be eligible for consideration the book must be on a subject within a field of British or Irish history and have been published in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland during the calendar year. It must also be its author's first solely written book and be an original and scholarly work of historical research.
Books are nominated by their publishers.
Further information and entry form
Past Winners of the Whitfield Prize
The Whitfield Prize for 2009 was awarded to:
Dr. Nicholas Draper (UCL) for The Price of Emancipation: Slave-ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Judges’ citation:
When in 1833 the imperial parliament agreed to abolish slavery in British dominions, slave owners were offered compensation. Nicholas Draper’s highly original and illuminating monograph draws on documentation generated by this process to develop a social and cultural history of slaveowners in mainland Britain. At the core of his study lies a painstaking analysis of who the slaveowners were; around this central relationship often accreted other legal and financial complications, which makes this task harder to discharge accurately than some previous scholars have realised. Draper shows that, while slaveownership was characteristic of a distinct community, the passage of property in slaves through family gifts and inheritance means that individuals within this community were diverse, and their relations with the slave economy often highly mediated. He makes a significant and original contribution to women’s history by showing that family strategies often placed property in slaves in the hands of women. He also offers a nuanced account of ways in which slaveowners represented themselves in different contexts, an account of parliamentary debates around the issue of compensation, and of the administration and workings of the compensation process. His is a broadly conceived, empirically dense yet lucid study, at once hard headed and humane, which offers striking new perspectives on several key topics in modern British history.
The proxime accessit was:
Dr. Guy Ortolano (New York University) for The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Judges’ citation:
The clash between the scientist C.P. Snow and the literary scholar F.R. Leavis has an iconic role in modern British cultural history. In their exchanges, as they have commonly been understood, a forward-looking, but managerial science culture confronted a more traditional but also more humane literary culture. In this imaginative and beautifully written book. Guy Ortolano revisits this controversy, demonstrating masterfully both how much richer and how much more complex and contradictory than has commonly been supposed were the debates that Snow provoked with his 1959 address on ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. What ensued, Ortolano tells us, was ‘actually an ideological conflict between competing visions of Britain’s past, present and future’, revealing fissures within the ranks both of both scientists and of humanists. Ortolano also provides a subtle and convincing account of changes over time in the positions of both Snow and Leavis, in the context of larger mutations in British politics and culture. The technocratic left-winger Snow ended his days sympathetic to neo-conservatism; the traditionalist Leavis provided intellectual inspiration to a younger generation of British Marxist historians. Both Snow and Leavis had bases in Cambridge colleges, and the Cambridge milieu figured significantly in Snow’s ‘Strangers and Brothers’ sequence of novels; this book also provides a compelling account of the two men’s contrasting visions and projects for the university. Though it displays a fine sense of place, Ortolano’s study is nonetheless far from parochial; on the contrary, it provides a thought-provoking perspective on the ways in which we imagine cultural possibilities now.
Marshall and Centenary Fellowships
The Society's Marshall and Centenary Fellowships for 2010 were awarded as follows:
Marshall Fellows:
Robert Priest (New College, Oxford) for research on "The Production, Reception and Legacy of Ernest Renan's 'Vie de Jésus' in France"
and
Johannes Machielsen (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) for research on "Demons & Letters: the Life and Works of Martin Delrio (1551-1608)"
Centenary Fellows:
Katheryna Ihnat (Queen Mary, University of London) for research on "The Marian miracle collections and the Jews in post-Conquest England"
and
Alexander Russell (Jesus College, Oxford) for research on “England and the general councils (1409-1562)”
News
NEXT EVENT
Professor Barbara Taylor
"THE DEMISE OF THE ASYLUM IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN: A PERSONAL HISTORY"
Friday 24 September 2010 at 5.30pm
Cruciform Lecture Theatre 2, UCL
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