by the Past & Present editorial team

Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Roseanna Webster (Trinity College, Cambridge) has won the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize 2023 for an article in any field of history by a woman scholar”. The award was made for her article “Women and the Fight for Urban Change in Late Francoist Spain” (open access) due to be published next month in Past & Present no. 260 (August 2023). This year the Alexander Prize was also awarded to Dr. Jake Dyble (University of Padua) for the article “General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe” published last year in the Historical Journal.

The prize judges noted that:

“Roseanna Webster’s work on Francoist Spain is a classic account of history from below. She focuses on female activists in new housing estates whose concerns were to gain the necessities of life, such as a regular supply of running water. Webster’s use of oral histories shows how the role of activist jarred with traditional gender roles, and how this caused the women themselves some unease.

Webster’s unusual choice of subject matter and her careful handling of her source material has produced a nuanced account of life under Franco, which focuses not on soldiers or dissidents but on ordinary women and their ambivalence about their new roles.”

Our congratulations to Dr. Webster.

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