Society announces recipients of new grants supporting public history and conference panels

29 July 2025

Earlier this year, the Royal Historical Society launched a new strand of research funding to bring together historians working collaboratively across different sectors, including higher education, museums and archives, and public and community history.

The two new programmes — the Scouloudi Public History Grants and the Scouloudi Panel Grants — are made possible following a generous subvention to the Society by the Scouloudi Foundation.

Scouloudi Public History Grants support innovative practice in public history and provide funding for defined projects by historians working together in and beyond higher education. In offering these grants, the Society seeks to encourage collaborative public history, and to provide necessary financial support for non-academic participants which is often unavailable through existing funding schemes.

Scouloudi Panel Grants support the formation of panels to present, in-person, research on a shared historical theme at an academic conference, or equivalent event, in history or a cognate discipline. The scheme supports the creation of panels, of up to four principal participants, whose formation would not otherwise have been possible, in their entirety, due to an absence of financial support.

In this way, the Society seeks to make possible collaborative conference participation and research dissemination at a time when budgets for event attendance and travel have been cut. The scheme also aims to support panel membership by independent historians with no access to funding for conference participation.

The Society is pleased to announce the recipients of the first round of these two new award programmes:

Scouloudi Public History Grants, 2025-26

  • Rachel Dishington (University of Nottingham) and Sarah Colborne (University of Nottingham Archives) , ‘Living and Working Along the Leen’
  • Iqbal Singh (The National Archives) and Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS), ‘Participatory workshops on colonial history for historians in higher education, the GLAM sector and community history groups’
  • Kathleen McIlvenna (University of Derby) and Kate Crossley (Arkwright Society) , ‘Re-interpreting Florence Nightingale in Derbyshire’
  • Rachel Delman (Oxford) and James Spellane (The Charterhouse), ‘London’s Watery Heritage: Co-producing New Knowledge about the Charterhouse Water Maps’

Scouloudi Panel Grants, 2025-26

  • ‘Commons and Communities: Celebrating Professor Andy Wood’, with speakers Lily R. Chadwick, Mark Hailwood, Susannah Ottaway and Steve Hindle: to enable Lily Chadwick (Woodbrooke Centre, Birmingham) to participate in the panel, to take place at the 2025 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) in Montreal in November.
  • ‘Continuities and Challenges: Women’s Politics and Activism in 1970s Britain’, with speakers Jessica White, Caitríona Beaumont, Ruth Davidson, Lyndsey Jenkins, and Laura Beers: to support members of the panel without alternative means of institutional financial support to participate in the panel, to take place at the 2025 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) in Montreal in November.

The next call for applications for the Society’s Scouloudi Public History and Panel Grants is expected to open in Spring 2026 for projects and conferences in 2026-27.

HEADER IMAGE: Map of London, 1698 Wenceslaus Hollar (detail), public domain, Wikimedia Commons