The IHR Pollard Prize is awarded annually for the best paper presented at an Institute of Historical Research seminar by a postgraduate student, or by an early career researcher within one year of completing a PhD.
The Prize is supported by Oxford University Press, publisher of the IHR’s academic journal, Historical Research.
This year, we are accepting papers even if they haven’t been delivered in person, as long as they are still read and recommended by an appropriate convenor.
First prize
Fast track publication in the IHR journal, Historical Research, and £500 of OUP books.
Runner-up prizes
Publication in Historical Research, and £200 of OUP books. A variable number of runner up prizes will be awarded, depending on the quality of applications in any given year.
Submission Date
22 May 2020
Here’s what 2016 winner Anna Dorofeeva said about how winning the Pollard Prize has shaped her career:
Being nominated for the Pollard Prize by the IHR early medieval seminar conveners was an important validation of my doctoral research, which I’d just completed at the time. Winning the prize was incredible, and hugely valuable for my career: coming in the first year of my first postdoc, it helped me secure the next job.
Being published in Historical Research meant that my first accepted publication was a prize-winning one. The whole experience gave me confidence, as nothing else did, that I could succeed as a scholar. Ultimately, this helped to sustain my career. The ideas I first presented at the IHR five years ago still form the foundations of my current research.
Anna’s article was titled ‘Miscellanies, Christian reform and early medieval encyclopaedism: a reconsideration of the pre-bestiary Physiologus manuscripts‘. She is currently a ZKS/DU Barker Priory Library Junior Research Fellow at Durham University.
Past Pollard Prize winners also include:
- T. K. Dennison, Did serfdom matter? Russian rural society, 1750–1860 (2004)
- Rupa Viswanath, Spiritual slavery, material malaise: ‘untouchables’ and religious neutrality in colonial south India (2006)
- Sebastian R. Prange, ‘Measuring by the bushel’: reweighing the Indian Ocean pepper trade (2009)
- Christopher Dillon, ‘Tolerance means weakness’: the Dachau concentration camp S.S., militarism and masculinity (2012)
- Helen Esfandiary, ‘We could not answer to ourselves not doing it’: maternal obligations and knowledge of smallpox inoculation in eighteenth–century elite society (2019)
Full details of all past winners, 1999-2019, and their winning essays are available here.
Application
Enquiries and submissions should be directed to the Executive Editor at Historical Research. Email Dr Julie Spraggon
Historical Research is the academic journal of the IHR.
Our journal is a leading peer-reviewed publication with an international readership and reputation. Articles cover the middle ages to the twenty-first century, and a wide range of methodological approaches. From 2020 Historical Research is published by Oxford University Press.