Newsletter – June 2026

Residential Training Course

The 2026 Residential Training Course will take place 2-5 December.

The course is open to 12 graduate students who are currently engaged in work on a doctoral thesis on any topic in social, economic, or business history, or economics in the medieval, early modern or modern periods. Preference will be given to students who will be in their 2nd or 3rd year of doctoral study or equivalent in November 2026 (FTE).

Deadline – 11 September 2026

Call for Teaching Materials in Economic History

As the academic year draws to a close, many of us are finishing exam boards, writing module reviews, and preparing teaching materials for next year. Before you file away this year’s lectures, seminar plans, assessments, datasets, and classroom activities, we would like to encourage you to consider sharing some of your material with the wider economic history community.

The Society is working with the Economics Network to develop a dedicated economic history teaching and learning microsite. The site will provide a curated collection of pedagogical resources drawn from across the discipline, showcasing the variety of ways in which economic history is taught in universities and providing practical materials that colleagues can adapt and use in their own teaching.

Earlier this year, an initial call generated a number of valuable contributions. As we prepare for the next stage of the project, we would welcome further submissions from EHS members.

Submitted materials will be curated by the project team and made available through a new dedicated microsite hosted by the Economics Network. We are interested in a wide range of resources, including lecture slides, seminar exercises, reading lists, assessment briefs, datasets, archival activities, classroom experiments, and reflections on teaching practice. Contributions do not need to be extensive. A single lecture, seminar exercise, assessment, dataset, or teaching resource can be just as valuable as a complete module.

The aim is to build a resource that supports colleagues designing new modules, refreshing existing courses, or incorporating historical perspectives into economics, business, public policy, and related programmes. We are particularly keen to showcase the breadth of topics, methods, and pedagogical approaches currently being used across the economic history community.

We aim to publish the first tranche of material on the microsite in August/September and would therefore be particularly grateful to receive contributions over the coming weeks.
If you have materials that you would be willing to share, or would like to discuss a possible contribution, please contact Martin Poulter or Chris Colvin.

We hope members will consider contributing. This is an opportunity to build a lasting resource for the discipline and to help ensure that the teaching expertise developed across our community is shared as widely as possible.

Submit to The Long Run Blog

The Society welcomes blog submissions from members of the EHS at any career stage.

Blogs are posted to our website and publicised on social media. Topics can include (but are not limited to) research projects, new initiatives or past events/workshops.

Bursary Scheme for PhD Students

The Society invites applications for one-year bursaries of up to £5,000 to assist doctoral students (PhD) in United Kingdom colleges and universities; scholars who are visiting students at UK universities are ineligible to apply. The bursaries will be open to students (full or part-time), at any stage of their PhD career in economic and/or social history, although priority may be given to students who are close to completion; note that the PhD must be under way at the time of application. Please note also that applications from students currently in receipt of a full stipendiary award, or a fully-funded studentship covering fees and living costs, will not be considered.

Deadline – 31 July 2026

EHS Fellows 2026/27

Power Fellow – Emily Chung (London School of Economics)

Mapping Residential Change in British Industrial Cities, 1840-1900

Emily Chung is an urban economic historian of modern Britain. Her PhD (Cambridge) examined urban development and residential reform in Manchester from 1840-1900. Using census data, cartographic material, and trade directories, the project reconstructed the residential distribution of the city at a highly granular scale, and drew on this database alongside local medical reports and social investigations to connect changes in the urban fabric to developments in local administration and national legislation. Her research has overturned some of the traditional narratives about segregation in Victorian Manchester and proposes new ways to study industrial cities’ social and economic histories using spatial and demographic data. As Power Fellow (2026-7) at the London School of Economics, Emily will expand her scope of study to produce geodemographic reconstructions of two other British industrial cities — Birmingham and Glasgow — to further question the paradigms of demographic growth and urban social formations through both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison.

Postan Fellow – Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat (Cambridge Judge Business School)

Art Markets, Investment, and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat’s research examines how investors navigate markets characterised by imperfect information, using art as a case study. Drawing on economic history, she investigates how institutions, reputation, and expertise shape investment outcomes outside the formal financial system.
For her PhD at the London School of Economics, she examined the emergence of the modern art market in nineteenth-century Britain. Her thesis reconstructed more than 300,000 art transactions, creating the first large-scale annual art price index from 1800 to 1914. The thesis the importance of information when investing in this opaque market and how institutions like the National Gallery can generate excess returns by pursuing a value investing strategy.
During the Fellowship, Luisa plans to continue integrating the study of art markets into broader debates in financial and economic history. Moving beyond questions of investment, she is interested in the role of art as a store of wealth, using historical art market data to explore broader questions of wealth accumulation, inequality, and taxation.

Tawney Fellow – Camilla de Koning (University College London)

Breaking the Royal Monopoly: Illicit Private Trade and the Royal African Company’s Black Book, 1672-1702

Camilla de Koning is completing her PhD at the University of Manchester and Historic Royal Palaces. Her project analysed how British monarchs, from Charles II to George II (1660-1775), were personally connected to and involved in the expanding British empire. She specialises in the history of the British and Dutch Atlantic, focusing on slavery and kinship.
As Tawney Fellow, De Koning’s project examines how employees of the Royal African Company (RAC) navigated and undermined the company’s royal trading monopoly. Drawing on a unique source, the “Black Book,” which records 100 cases of illicit private trade, the project reconstructs the actions, motivations, and networks of captains, agents, and crew who engaged in contraband trade.
By combining prosopographical analysis with extensive archival research in the RAC records at The National Archives, Kew, the project reframes monopoly not as a fixed legal structure but as a contested economic practice shaped by incentives, enforcement, and individual agency. In doing so, it sheds new light on the everyday functioning of the early modern slave trade and the informal economies that sustained it.

Survey – AI use by Historians

Researchers at the Univeristy of Sheffield are seeking participants for an online survey.

The survey, organised by Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, explores how professional historians across the UK are using AI in their work and the ways in which they see AI impacting on the discipline of History. The intention is for the results to help historians have a stronger voice in shaping institutional AI policies and to contribute to the development of better AI tools for the historical discipline.