Royal Historical Society Grant and Fellowship

I'm delighted to share two pieces of good news.

First, I have been elected as an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society -- a recognition I'm honoured to receive and a community I'm proud to be part of.

Second, I have been awarded an Early Career Fellowship Grant from the Royal Historical Society to support the development of two research outputs arising from my doctoral research.

The principal focus of the Fellowship is the transformation of my thesis into a scholarly monograph, provisionally titled 'Creeds of Kinship'. While the thesis reconstructed the lives and ideas of Anna Kingsford and Henry Salt through an animal-human biographical lens, the book will refine this material into a more synthetic and conceptually driven intervention in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history. I will be foregrounding the methodological contribution to relational and multispecies intellectual history, sharpening the book's engagement with the histories of ethics, science, religion, and reform. I have had encouraging informal conversations with academic editors, and I am still currently engaging with different publishers whilst developing my proposal.

Alongside the monograph proposal, the Fellowship will support the completion of a journal article tentatively titled 'Anna Kingsford / Anna Kingsford: Performance and Biography'. Drawing on unpublished memoir material by Kingsford's friend Florence Fenwick Miller, the article challenges the authoritative biography of Kingsford written by her collaborator Edward Maitland, analysing Kingsford instead as what Miller called a 'protean' figure — someone who consciously performed multiple intellectual, spiritual, and social identities. The article contributes to nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history by reassessing the authority of biographical sources and examining how gender, collaboration, and self-representation shaped the historical record.

I'm enormously grateful to the Royal Historical Society for this support. More updates on both projects will follow here as the work develops. In the meantime, anyone working on Victorian reform culture, the history of animal ethics, or methodological questions in intellectual history is very welcome to get in touch.