This year’s SHS conference saw the return of our postgraduate paper prize, which had been paused between 2020 and 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and gradual return to in person conferences. The prize is awarded to the strongest paper submitted in advance of our conference. This year entries were judged by a committee led by Dr David Hitchcock.
The winner of the 2024 prize is Rebecca Orr for the paper ‘Between Imperial and International Families: Intimate Memories of Colonial Rule, c. 1945-present’ .
Rebecca Orr is a PhD candidate at the European University Institution and her paper drew on her research about British High Commissions after the Second World War. Rebecca presented her paper in a panel on Postcolonial Legacies in the Difference, Minoritisation and Othering strand of our conference.
Rebecca’s paper was based on oral history interviews with diplomatic families and unpacked personal recollections of decolonisation and service to empire. Her paper was highly praised by the judges, who described it as ‘compelling, carefully constructed, and elegantly written’.
On receiving her award, Rebecca told us:
I am very pleased to have been awarded the SHS postgraduate paper prize. This is my first time attending the conference, and it has been a really stimulating experience. I have enjoyed hearing from people working on a broad range of topics and have appreciated how inclusive and friendly the conference is for postgraduates.
Such was the standard of entries this year, that the judges picked two runners up: Elena Mary (University of Oxford) for ‘“Her neck of ivory”: Whiteness, beauty, and the female neck in England, c. 1840-1950’ and Jennifer McFarland (University of Cambridge) for ‘Getting old at home in the seventeenth-century Veneto’.