find us and Meet our Editorial Board

EDITORS

Alice Rio is, with Matthew Hilton, Editor of Past & Present. She is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College, London. Her research interests include slavery and unfreedom, law and legal texts, and the Carolingian Empire.

Matthew Hilton is, with Alice Rio, Editor of Past & Present. He is a Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is interested in the social and cultural history of modern Britain, with a particular focus on consumer society, social activism and non-governmental organizations.

Renaud Morieux is Publications Editor at Past & Present. He is Professor of European History and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His key research interests relate to identity, migration, borders, maritime spaces, war and captivity.

Anna Bayman is the Associate Editor of Past & Present. Her research interests include seventeenth-century London and early modern popular literature, and she has recently published a book on the prose works of Thomas Dekker.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Chair of Past&Present

Joanna Innes (Chair) is Winifred Holtby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Somerville College, University of Oxford. She is interested in English social policy from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, in its British and European context.

Roper

Lyndal Roper (Vice-Chair) is Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the early modern European witch craze, religion and gender in early modern Germany, and Martin Luther.

Past&Present Board Member

Steve Smith (Vice-Chair) is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He specialises in the social history of 19th- and 20th-century China and Russia. He is currently working on a comparative history of Communist Russia and China.

Past&Present Board Member

Gadi Algazi is Professor in Medieval History at Tel Aviv University. His area of expertise is the social and cultural history of Medieval Europe.

Paul Betts is Professor of Modern European History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He specialises in Modern European history, particularly twentieth-century Germany.

John Arnold is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses upon popular religious culture, heresy and the inquisition, and popular politics in the pre-modern era.

Braddick

Michael Braddick is Professor of History and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield. His research interests include state formation and political culture in early modern Britain.

Cannadine

David Cannadine is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. His area of research includes the social, political and cultural history of modern Britain and its empire.

Patricia Clavin is Professor of International History at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses upon 20th Century European and global diplomatic history.

Deborah Cohen is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on global British imperial history, the family and emotions.

Celia Donert is Associate Professor in Central European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. Her research is on contemporary central European history.

Martin Dusinberre is Professor of Global History at the University of Zurich. His research is in the field of modern Japanese history.

Past&Present Board Member

Gary Gerstle is the new Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. His work ranges across 20th-century U.S. history, with special interests in race, class, ethnicity and state-building.

Earle

Rebecca Earle  is a Professor a the University of Warwick who works on early modern Spanish American and European cultural history. Her research especially focuses upon the cultural and political significance of food.

P&P Board member

Brodwyn Fischer is a Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She specialises in the study of cities, citizenship, law, migration, race and social inequality in Latin America and especially in Brazil

Ruth Harris is Professor of Modern History at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Her area of research is the cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, especially France.

Sarah Knott is Associate Professor in the department of History at Indiana University. She is a scholar of early America and the revolutionary Atlantic world, and her research focuses on the intricate meeting-ground of politics, culture and society.

Matthew Kelly is Professor of Modern History at Northumbria University. His research interests are in modern British environmental history, including the history of policy development, national parks and the cultural history of landscape.

Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor in Global History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on urban history, feminism, decolonisation, and transnational social movements, primarily in southeast Asia from the late colonial era to the Cold War.

Stephen Lovell is Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London. His primary research interests lie in the social and cultural history of 19th and 20th Century Russia.

Mazower

Mark Mazower is Ira D. Wallach Professor and Department Chair of History at Columbia University. He specialises in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe and international history.

Past&Present Board Member

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at St Cross College, University of Oxford. His area of expertise is twentieth-century Chinese history.

Past&Present Board Member

Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. His area of research includes the political, social and economic history of Ancient Greece, and Classical art and archaeology.

Past&Present Board Member

Judith Pollmann is Professor of Early Modern Dutch History at Leiden University. She specialises in the history of the early modern Netherlands and is currently interested in the memory of the Dutch Revolt.

Chase F. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of History at the Smithsonian Museum, Washington D.C. A historian of the pre-modern Middle East, he has written extensively about medieval Islamic society and culture.

Giorgio Riello is a Professor of Global History and Culture at the European University Institute. His research here focuses upon early modern material and consumer culture.

Past&Present Board Member

Lucie Ryzova is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on the cultural history of modern Egypt with a particular focus upon popular culture and vernacular modernity.

Alexandra Shepard is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include gender, material culture, work and social relations in early modern England.

Mrinalini Sinha is Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transnational approaches.

Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge. His work fouses on global oceanic history, especially of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the history of human – animal interactions.

Alice Taylor is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. Her work explores the social role and performance of the law in medieval British society between the seventh and thirteenth centuries.

Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History and a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. Her research is on Early Modern British religious and cultural history. Between 2014 and 2022 she co-edited Past & Present with Matthew Hilton.

Brenda Stevenson is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. A scholar of race, slavery, gender, family and racial conflict her work centres on the comparative, historical experiences of women, family, and community across racial and ethnic lines.

Megan Vaughan is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. Her area of research includes the social, economic and cultural history of Africa and slavery in the Indian Ocean.

Angela Zimmerman is Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, studying revolutions, political thought, imperialism and capitalism.

PAST & PRESENT FELLOWS

Every year Past & Present sponsors four postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research London. Fuller details can be found here.

For a list of previous Fellowship holders and their post-fellowship destinations see here

2022-24 Fellowship Holders

Head and shoulders photo of Mark Czeller. He is a white man with a short fair beard in his early 30s with glasses and a shaved head. He wears a reddy-orange button up shirt

Mark Czeller is a historian of twentieth-century China, with a focus on the Mao era. His research explores the Chinese Communist Party’s categorization of a substantial minority of the Chinese population as “class enemies” between land reform (1946-52) and the late 1970s.

Photo of Kamil Karczewski from the waist up stood on a beach with cliffs in the background. he wears all black clothing and has short dark brown hair and a short dark brown beard. He is a white man in his early to mid 30s

Kamil Karczewski is a historian of modern Eastern Europe who specialises in the history of sexuality and nationalism, particularly the global mobility of queer people and the transnational flows of ideas about sex and self.

Photo of Jane MacRae Campbell. Head and shoulders shot against a background of a map. She is a white woman with shoulder length curly dark hair wearing red

Jane MacRae Campbell is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic world. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of unrealised or partially-realised colonial projects for the New World in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

2023-25 Fellowship Holders

Lotte Francoise Maria Houwink ten Cate is a historian of historian of modern Europe, with interests in intellectual and social history, and the history of sexuality. Her research examines 1970s feminist thought and praxis, and the transformation of intimate violence—in public perception, social science, and the law—from a private matter to a state concern.

Lamin Manneh is a historian of West Africa with interest in Black diaspora, colonial politics, urban infrastructure and environment. My research examines Liberated African political formation in relation to wetland drainage and land reclamation in the post-emancipation era of British Gambia.

Ana Struillou is a historian of the early modern Mediterranean, interested in all things material and mobile. Her work explores the movement of artefacts and commodities between the Ottoman and non-Ottoman Maghrib, the Iberian Peninsula, and the French Monarchy across the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Tonicha Upham is a medieval historian with a particular interest in gender. Working with Arabic and Persian geographical sources on the north, her research offers a comparative analysis of Islamicate geographical discussions of pagan rituals, customs, and practice which place discussions of Viking and Rus in a broader global context.

Malika Zehni is a historian of trans-border migration, imperial boundaries, and bureaucratic governance in Central Asia. Investigating the dynamics between mobile individuals and emerging paper regimes during the turn of the twentieth century, her work highlights experiences of navigation, adaptation, and resistance amid shifting imperial landscapes.