Aileen Fyfe

Closing dates for next application rounds: Mondays 13 October and 15 December 2025 The Royal Historical Society represents the interests of historical researchers in universities, libraries, archives, museums, heritage and broadcasting, as well as those engaged in public, community and family history research.

The RHS is a membership organisation of 6500+ historians. We welcome applications to join us at any time. Our next closing dates are 13 October and 15 December.

We offer categories for all kinds of historians and at all stages of research, from Postgraduate to Fellow: bit.ly/46V8WOQ #Skystorians

If you'll take a science example... Royal Society journals: backlist 1665-1950 is free, but 1950-1996 is paywalled. The most recent stuff is either diamondOA or hybrid-moving-to-Subscribe-to-Open, depending on which journal. royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstl...

You've got to love #openaccess for books (if you can fund it). Now ~19,000 downloads for A History of Scientific Journals: publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015. Unbelievable figures, compared to traditional academic book publishing! From @uclpress.bsky.social or www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv...

William Fox Talbot MP: the inventor of photography The inventor of photography William Fox Talbot died one hundred and thirty-five years ago today. A man of many talents, Talbot made distinguished contributions to maths, physics, botany, archaeolog…

Died #OnThisDay 1877 William Henry Fox Talbot. Best known as the pioneer of photography, he was also briefly MP for Chippenham, 1832-5, but stepped down to concentrate on his scientific interests. There’s more on him in our short article: victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/w...

Early career fellowships in cultural and heritage institutions: 2025 Apply for funding to conduct research at participating cultural and heritage institutions.

Exciting early-career fellowships with UK cultural institutions, funded by #AHRC, www.ukri.org/opportunity/... (look for the spreadsheet with the list of institutions!) Deadline for EoI: 10 December.

Banner with "shortlist" and the four book covers

Congratulations to the shortlisted authors for the Hughes Prize 2025! Check out these four highly intriguing books from different corners of the history of STEM, all of them perfect reads for non-experts. Accessible to broader audiences, they will take you to unexpected places and times!
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This is a great PhD opportunity for someone! I was lucky to do some work on Sarah Sophia’s coin collection in early days www.bl.uk/services/res...

Ann Kettle Ann Kettle lectured in the Department of Mediaeval History at St Andrews for more than forty years. In addition to her teaching and research, she held various administrative posts in the university…

Another @vchlondon.bsky.social woman with a St Andrews connection is Ann Kettle (several decades later...) women-historians.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2022/10/19/a...

I'm just starting a new student-led project focusing on St Andrews students 1898-1948 (including LLAs, and women degree graduates), so all info gratefully received!

Thank you! I'm particularly intrigued by the colonial connections of two of those names... One of my other projects was legacies-of-empire.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk - section 7 of the report examines students who came from or went to British colonies, but we struggled to get much career info for LLAs

Ooh, thanks for that!

The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship – RSVP The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship was named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP Board member and Vice President, Linda Peterson. The purpose of the Peterson Fellowship is to…

Peterson Fellowships open today! Named for Yale professor and our dear friend, Linda H. Peterson, the Peterson Fellowship is designed to support one scholar for four full-time months conducting research focused on the British periodical press of long #19thC. Applications due Nov. 15!

Edith MacQueen PhD (1900-1977) Edith Edgar MacQueen (1900-1977) MA 1922, PhD 1927 (later Mrs Haden-Guest, later Lady Haden-Guest) Edith MacQueen appears to have been the first woman historian to be awarded a Ph.D. in History by …

My current favourite stories - for two contrasting experiences of women historians from the interwar period - are those of Caroline Doris Ketelbey MA and Edith MacQueen PhD. See women-historians.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2021/03/22/e... and women-historians.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2022/04/05/d...

1889 Universities (Scotland) Act affected all the Scottish universities. Lots of clauses, implemented over the next few years, including the admission of women in 1892. (And new faculties and degree programmes, e.g. Honours degree in History)

Anybody wanting to trace students at St Andrews pre-1897 (but not LLA women, unless they later did a degree - sorry) can look them up here: arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/biographical...

The Uni archives will have details of which subjects they took in their LLAs, and some basic details from when they registered (e.g. address). Whethere there is more info... It depends! Ask my archives colleagues on unicolls@st-andrews.ac.uk

The St Andrews Historian is our annual alumni magazine and we would love to hear from you! If any alumni want to share any professional, personal or academic milestones, please contact us at hiscomms@st-andrews.ac.uk!

Image courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID: ms38426/2

Home - St Andrews Heritage Museum & Gardens St Andrews Heritage Museum and Garden is set in a 17th century fisherfolk house, one of the earliest domestic dwellings in the area.

Do visit! standrewsmuseum.com

Lovely event in #StAndrews yesterday - the reopening of the Heritage Museum on North Street. Local history (toy shop!) blended with an awareness of the wider world (medieval European connections; the colonial trade in sugar; Italian, Polish and Ukrainian migrants...)

BSHS Exhibiting Excellence Prize 2024 Winners Announced BSHS Exhibiting Excellence Prize 2024 Winners Announced The Exhibiting Excellence Prize recognises excellence in public exhibitions that address topics in the history of science, history of technolog...

More detail on the three winners of the @bshsnews.bsky.social Exhibiting Excellence Prize for #histSTM exhibitions 📜 www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-exhibit...

Women Historians of St Andrews Women Historians in St Andrews research project

The story of one (Scottish) university: admission of women students, 1892; first women graduates in History, 1903; woman PhD in History, 1927; woman lecturer in History, 1935;.... first woman professor of History, 2009. We've been exploring the women before 2009: women-historians.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk

Done - though I'm not sure I understood some of the questions... I write as someone who has been using a certain well-known commerical reference management package for 25+ years, and is now totally locked-in.

Orientation Week begins on Monday and we are really looking forward to welcoming our new students, and to seeing some familiar faces as well.

Pier Walk at St Andrews, c. 1940-5, Image Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID 1983-1-1
#EvertoExcel

It was fantastic to see #histsci friend @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social on stage at @edbookfest.bsky.social last week. I particularly love the images of the author hard at work signing books...

Three women on a stage. Left to right, they are wearing: a red and patterned trouser; suit and cream sandals; a pale shirt and trousers, bright red shoes, and a black face mask; black top, white robe, and black and white patterened skirt, boots, and a headwrap. In the background is a pale purple screen with “Edinburgh International Book Festival” on the right, and the corner of a printed pamphlet and part of the auto-captioning visible at the top left.

Two women (one in pale shirt, other in red and patterned trouser suit), one masked, in front of a blue screen. Projected on screen is a medieval world map and a zoomed-in detail of said map, partly overlaying the map.

Dark-haired woman in a black face mask is engrossed in signing a pile of copies of a bright red book with a silvery mirror and black frame, entitled “Humans: A Monstrous History.” She sits at a desk covered in a black cloth. On the left is a brass-coloured desk lamp with a triangular shade.

Dark-haired woman in a black face mask looks up quizzically while signing a pile of copies of “Humans: A Monstrous History.” She sits at a desk covered in a black cloth. On the left is a brass-coloured desk lamp with a triangular shade.

Thrilling panel at @edbookfest.bsky.social with @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social! @yassmin.bsky.social was our chair & interlocutor.

For a 30% discount on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY from @ucpress.bsky.social, 1/

💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #politics #HAMH #edbookfest

... and that is a reminder that nothing disappears on the internet! (There were other #histsci themed songs sung at that event, too.)

Roper-Hannah Chair in the History of Healthcare and Health Equity | University of King's College

#jobfairy - #histmed position at Dalhousie/Uni of Kings College in Halifax (interested to see a 'chair' is a junior position, tenure stream not tenured - does 'chair' just mean 'externally funded' in the Canadian system?)
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I'm pretty sure I heard that sung - with a very rousing chorus - by some of my more musical #histsci colleagues at #bshs in Aberdeen 2010...! Not sure if audio/video still exists... @bshsnews.bsky.social

This Special Issue from #NotesandRecords focuses on the complex cultural connections between Japanese and British science in the nineteenth century. Read the issue here: royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rsnr/202... #HistSci

Bar chart showing source of referals to a website. LinkedIn comes out at the top, far ahead of Facebook and Zenodo, with Buesky lagging in 4th (and X even further down the list).

Proof that #bsky isn't (yet, for me) performing the role that the #birdsite once did... Far more people have visited our University report into legacies of empire (legacies-of-empire.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk ) from #LinkedIn than from here.