The Royal Historical Society (RHS) is continuing to support historians amid historic change during the pandemic. In early July, we made 22 financial awards to historians in COVID-19 related hardship, as well as enabling scores of early career scholars the opportunity to access digital research materials during lock down. With your help, we can mitigate some of the impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable researchers, protecting the vitality of historical scholarship.

In May 2020,the Royal Historical Society (RHS) launched 2 new schemes to address the impact of COVID-19 on UK based History early career historians (ECRs). The first scheme, in collaboration with Adam Matthew digital publishers, will make available to History ECRs (without cost) up to 200 twelve-month subscriptions to the Adam Matthew digital collections of archival, printed primary and secondary sources. The second scheme is a Hardship Fund, drawn from the RHS funds, to support UK-based History ECRs of any nationality not in receipt of full fellowship funding whose finances have been significantly affected by COVID-19.

The Society will be offering 2 rounds of Hardship funding in summer 2020, and may offer additional Hardship funding thereafter. We initially allocated £12,000 to this Fund, building in a lottery allocation system for eligible applicants, in the event that worthy applications substantially outstripped our funds. We proposed making grants of up to £500 per applicant, or up to 24 awards in total over 2 application rounds.

Round 1 of the Hardship scheme closed on 29 June 2020 with 88 applications. The great majority of these applications demonstrate significant need. PhD students and recent (within the past 2 years) postdoctoral historians have lost hundreds of pounds of promised, often essential employment in university teaching, exam invigilation, and student ambassador roles, as well as part-time, often zero hour, employment in offices, restaurants, museums and other sectors. Self-funding, part-funded and international PhD students and recent recipients of the PhD have been especially hard hit. In this first round, we awarded £11,000 worth of support to historians in hardship.

How you can help:

We know that historians and those who promote their work have many calls on their finances at this time. But we also hope that those among our community who can make a contribution to augment our fund, however small, will be willing to consider doing so.

The RHS will, in response to the obvious great need evidenced in the 88 applications in round 1, increase the sum we initially allocated from our 2020-21 annual budget to the Hardship Fund. However, even this augmented pot will clearly not be adequate to meet the needs of the majority of worthy applicants.

Any contribution you can make will have two beneficial effects. First, it will increase the number of ECRs to whom we can provide an allocation from the Fund. Second, by reducing the pressure on the Hardship Fund, it will enable the Society to continue to support ECR researchers to undertake research supported by our standard grant schemes (which remain open) as improvements in the COVID-19 landscape make that possible.