The Historical Geography Research Group, in association with the Routledge Research in Historical Geography Series, is pleased to offer a prize to the best undergraduate or Scottish 4-year MA undergraduate dissertation in any area of historical geography which is based upon original research and which demonstrates conceptual and/or methodological sophistication. The successful prize winner will receive £200 of Routledge-published books, and will be invited to submit an article based upon their dissertation for publication in the Journal of Historical Geography (subject to the standard refereeing procedures of that periodical). The winner will also be invited to present their work at the annual Practising Historical Geography conference in November.

Dissertations should normally be of first-class standard and be nominated by Heads of Department / Examination Boards / dissertation supervisors as appropriate. Departments should not submit more than one dissertation for consideration. Only dissertations submitted (during the current academic year) by students enrolled in a geography degree programme at a university in the UK or the Republic of Ireland will be considered.

Please use this form to submit your student’s dissertation for consideration for this prize. You will be asked to submit the dissertation itself via email to rhed@rgs.org.

Queries can be sent to the Dissertation Prize Coordinator.

Next Deadline: TBC in 2026

2025

Winner

Ricardo Padilla (University of Oxford): ‘Shipshape! Global Places, Identities, and Networks along the Manila Galleon Trade, 1691-1794.’

Highly Commended

Eva Weinstein (University of Cambridge): ‘Haunting the Arctic: Spectral Geographies of the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway.’

2024

Winner

Lola Francis (University of Oxford): ‘Seeking Fairies: Witches, Women, and Nature in Early Modern Scotland.’

Highly Commended

Gracie Vincent (University of Hull): ‘Lesbian identity in urban space.’

2023

Winner

Emma Chambers (University of Nottingham): ‘Stairs, Identity, and Memory in Nottingham 1837-1925.’

Highly Commended:

Laura Dionysio-Li (University of Cambridge): ‘Memory, identity and a re-reading of Britain’s urban landscape: An exploration of local-scale decolonisation through the Gloucester City Monuments Review.’

2022

Winner

Sasha Liwicki (Edinburgh): ‘A decolonial investigation into the narratives of Palestinian Embroidery: How are themes of resistance, heritage, and memory woven into the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive’s embroidery collection?’

Highly Commended:

Manon Davies-Lewis (UCL): ‘Paupers, Punishment, and Popular Protest in rural west Wales during the 19th Century.’

2021

Winners

Bethany Walsh (University of Edinburgh): ‘Nature, Nation and Narrative: The Visual and Discursive Representation of National Park Tourism in Brochures for Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, 1932-1970.’

and

Jamie Arnaud (University of Cambridge): ‘Roads to Improvement: The Construction of “Destitution Roads” by the Edinburgh Section of the Central Board as a response to Highland Famine, 1847-1850.’

Highly Commended:

Sorcha McKee (University of Glasgow): ‘The 1984-85 Miner’s Strike: An investigation into the spaces of political involvement constructed by women during the strike in mining communities’

2020

Winners

Sophie Thiesen (National University of Ireland, Maynooth): ‘The Heretical Geographies of Irish Witches and Fairies.’

and

Grace Atkinson (UCL): ‘Disrupting Gendered Dichotomies of Colonial Knowledge and Representation: A Critical Analysis of Beatrice Grimshaw’s and Kathleen Haddon’s Travel Writing and Photography in Papua New Guinea, 1910-1914.’

Highly Commended:

Bethany Williamson (Northumbria University): ‘Historical geographies of labour control regimes in Belper (nineteenth century).’

2019

Winner:

Olivia Russell (University of Edinburgh): ‘Geography, Cartography and Military Intelligence; Gertrude Bell’s Cartographic Work for The Royal Geographical Society in 1913 to 1918.’

Highly Commended:

Tallulah Gordon (UCL): ‘Suffragettes in the City: Exploring Gendered Memory Through Analysis of Two London Exhibitions Commemorating the British Women’s Suffrage Centenary.’

2018

Winner:

Harry Gibbs (University of Oxford): ‘Connected concrete, vital communications and the radical openness of civil defence: Reimagining the Cold War bunker.’

Highly Commended:

Isabel Dewhurst (University of Cambridge): ‘Jennie Churchill: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide and the Origins of the “Special Relationship” Through the Lens of the Female Body.’

2017

Winner:

Anna Lawrence (University of Cambridge): “Morals and Mignonette: the use of flowers in the Moral Regulation of Women, Children, and the working classes in Late-Victorian London”.

Highly Commended:

Robert Frost (University of Nottingham): “In search of health, and, incidentally, of other things: British visitors to Egypt, c. 1830–1930″.

2016

Winner:

Lucy Taylor (UCL): “The male gaze of colonial cartography: a feminist analysis of maps of Africa from the Royal Geographical Society archive, 1851–1891”.

Highly Commended:

Sarah Rafferty (University of Nottingham): “Epidemic smallpox in England and Wales, 1920–35: variola minor transmission, with special reference to Gloucestershire, 1923–24”.

2015

Winner: 

Victoria Bellamy (University of Cambridge): “Cultivating virtuous citizens: conflicting spatial practices in London’s Victoria Park”.

Highly Commended:

Fraser Eccles (University of Oxford): “Re-animating Sheffield’s ‘Jungle’: encountering the sentient commodities of Sheffield’s travelling menagerie 1910-1913”.

2014

Winner

Charlie Hiscock (University of Nottingham): “Oysteropolis: Whitstable, Oysters and the Shaping of a Heritage Foodscape”.

Highly Commended

Iara Calton (King’s College London): “Let’s All Go Down The Strand: The Geography of the Music Hall in London 1850-1899”.

2013

Winner

Rosanna Phillips (King’s College London): “The Empire at home: attitudes of the British public towards the Indian famines of 1896–1897 and 1899–1901”.

Highly Commended

Rebecca House (University of Cambridge): “Performing Prague’s heritage: the performative politics of historical walking tours”.

and

Jack Watson (University of Oxford): “Holiday camps: discourses of freedom and mechanisms of constraint in mid-twentieth century Britain”.

2012

Winner

Thomas H. Crawford (University of Bristol): “Production, power and performance in the Atlas novus of 1675 by W. and J. Blaeu”.

Highly Commended

Edward O’Donnell (University of Exeter): “A haunted pillbox: the unexpected uses and interpretations of a micro-scale heritage landscape”.

2011

Winner

Katariina Makela (University College London): “Modern urban women: a study of Signe Brander’s photography in early 20th-century Helsinki”.

Highly Commended

Emily Casey (University of Oxford): “The cultivation of virtue: morality, class and nature in the public parks movement at Battersea, c. 1840–1900”.

2010

Winners

Kallum Dhillon (University College London): “Help or hindrance? The effects of philanthropic social housing near St Pancras/King’s Cross on the Victorian working classes”.

and

Rory Hill (University of Exeter): “Circuits of capital: placing the end of francophone Methodism in Jersey, 1900–1950”.

2009

Winner

Robert Mackinnon (Aberystwyth University): “The Great Western Railway’s rural England: ways of ‘being in’ and ‘moving through’ the English landscape in Great Western Railway publicity materials, 1918–1939”.

2007

Winner

Ann Farmer (University of Oxford): “Employment in agriculture c.1760–1830 on a Surrey farm: work, wages and women”.

2006

Winners

Andreas Beavor (University of Essex): “Subjugated races, appropriated places”.

and

Louise Henderson (University of St Andrews): “Knowledge spaces of African exploration”.

2004

Winner

Jennifer Scott (University of Oxford): “Edinburgh’s lower east side: evaluating the rhetoric of sanitary reform, 1861–1881”.

Highly Commended

Alistair Gates (University College London): “Assessing the generality of J. L. Stein’s findings for Hampstead: examining the social reception and diffusion of the telephone in Camden Town, 1890–1911”.

2003

Winner

Sefton Laing (University of Edinburgh): “Late-Victorian science at the ‘highest office in the United Kingdom’: a contextual investigation of the Ben Nevis Observatory, 1883–1904“.

Highly Commended

Julia Worboys (University of Manchester): “Sustainability in British provincial geography at the turn of the 20th century: a comparison of the Manchester and Liverpool Geographical Societies 1884–1932”.

2002

Winner

Innes M. Keighren (University of Edinburgh): “The imaginary worlds of John Kirtland Wright”.