The Oxford Historian

Of Prizes and Cuts  

Prizes can at times seem like a mixed blessing in contemporary academia. We take great pride in the awards won by our students, and are modestly pleased when one of the numerous league tables of universities declares that Oxford is the best university for History. But the multiplication of prizes which has occurred in recent years – some influenced by commercial agendas, and others by present-day preoccupations  – can at times make it difficult to discern their real value.

It was therefore with enormous pride that we learned in the spring that the recently retired Regius Professor, Lyndal Roper, had been awarded a prize of indisputable distinction: the Holberg Prize. This is a major prize awarded by an international committee funded by the Norwegian Government for fundamental research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Law and Theology; and is intended to compensate for the absence of Nobel Prizes in these disciplines. Lyndal received the award in Bergen earlier this month, and you can read more about the splendid ceremony, and watch Lyndal’s lecture here:

https://holbergprize.org/events-and-productions/the-2026-holberg-lecture-lyndal-roper/

Lyndal is an immensely deserving recipient of this Prize. During her period as the Regius Professor, and before that as a tutor at Balliol, and as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton, Lyndal has been the pioneer of a new way of writing about the history of early modern Europe that combines in a highly skilful way the history of gender, of religion, and of cultural norms, all informed by her distinctive application of psychological methods. Her books on, among others, the early modern witch craze, Martin Luther, and most recently the German Peasants War are not only major works of scholarship but also talk to issues of our time; and it is gratifying that the Holberg Prize jury has recognised her outstanding achievement as a member of our Faculty.

As Lyndal would be quick to say, History is not an individual discipline, and her work is just one example of the collective work of members of the historical community in Oxford and elsewhere. Over the last year, the Faculty has made a number of new and replacement appointments across different areas of historical research, ranging from early medieval Europe to South Asian History, and a new Professorship in post-1989 Contemporary European History. We have been able to make these appointments because of the strong demand – especially at the graduate level – for the study of History, the success of our colleagues in winning external research grants, as well as our collaboration with colleges in fundraising for the subject, especially from our alumni.

But the current strength of the Faculty stands in stark contrast to the cuts being implemented in many History departments in universities across the UK. Closures of departments, institutional mergers, redundancies, short-term contracts, and early retirement programmes, have gathered pace over the last year across many universities – most recently at Essex, Hertfordshire, Nottingham, and Exeter. These are not malicious acts of managerialist vandalism, but the ineluctable consequence of three forces: the quasi-freezing of the fees provided by the government for undergraduate degrees; the vertiginous fall in the number of European and global students, as a consequence of departure from the EU and changes in UK visa regulations; and the massive reduction in public funding of graduate study and research in History.

As the Royal Historical Society has made clear in a number of forthright public statements (see royalhistsoc.org), this combination of pressures is rapidly eroding the study and practice of History in the UK. The hollowing out of undergraduate degree programmes frustrates the demand of students to study a diverse range of historical periods and subjects; the collapse in state funding for graduate work cuts off the pipeline of new scholars entering the profession; and the reductions in public funding for research in History and other Humanities subjects imperils the collaboration of historians with a range of public and private cultural organisations who do so much to communicate historical knowledge to wider audiences. History is a subject with benefits much wider than the knowledge it generates, and the questions it asks. It remains one of the most strongly demanded subjects at the undergraduate level, and students of History are to be found in a wide range of professions and other forms of employment. Above all, an understanding of History provides more than ever the perspectives and skills to make sense of our rapidly changing world.

For all of these reasons, the History Faculty emphatically supports the campaigns to protect History as a discipline, a profession, and a subject which really matters. Let’s hope that together we can make that case.

Professor Martin Conway

Chair of the History Faculty Board