Matt Elton: You recently sent out an email newsletter in your capacity as Royal Historical Society [RHS] president, highlighting the issue of university history funding. What do you, and the RHS, see as being the problem?
My sense is that things are bad, and getting worse. My predecessors as RHS president would occasionally hear from a department being restructured or closed down. Now we get these emails every couple of months. It was also previously the case that a history department at risk of closure was typically a small department in an institution that didn’t have a very long tradition of teaching history. But we’re now hearing from much larger universities that have had a large and thriving history department for perhaps 60 years, and with 30 or 40 members of staff, that are suffering really serious recruitment and retention problems. So we do think
