Professor elected into the Royal Historical Society
English professor Donald Dickson was elected as a fellow for the United Kingdom's foremost historical organization, Royal Historical Society.
By Alix Poth ’18
The Royal Historical Society (RHS) of the United Kingdom recently elected Department of English professor Donald Dickson as a fellow for the organization.
Donald Dickson
The RHS was founded in 1868 and remains the foremost society in the UK for historians promoting scholarly study of the past. The organization is “a learned society with charitable status that is increasingly at the forefront of policy debates about the study of history.” RHS champions the interests of the historical profession and the place of history within culture.
Fellows are named for making “an original contribution to historical scholarship, normally through the authorship of a monograph, a body of scholarly work similar in scale and impact to a monograph, or the organisation of exhibitions.” The process includes being nominated by a fellow and being approved by the Council of the Society.
Texas A&M’s professor R.J.Q. Adams of the Department of History, also a fellow of the RHS, says the RHS has been “the premier organization in Britain and, in the English-speaking world, of professionals of all disciplines who publish in the many varieties of history. Election to fellowship is widely recognized as an honor of the highest order.”
Dickson says he is grateful to have received such an honor.
“As a member of an English department interested in the intellectual history of seventeenth-century England as much as in its literature, I was especially gratified to be nominated and then elected a fellow by such an august body as the Royal Historical Society,” he says. “This validates the historically-oriented work I have been doing for most of my career.”
Fellows will be announced by the Honorary Secretary at the next lecture of the RHS on July 5. Read more about the Royal Historical Society fellowship here.