Academic Toby’s love of history recognised with a Fellowship

An academic’s passion for the past has been recognised with a Fellowship of an august national organisation.

Toby Purser, Senior Lecturer in Education at University of Northampton, is also a former teacher and Deputy Head. When he’s not busy inspiring the next generation of teaching professionals, Toby can be found researching and writing about his specialist area – British history before the Reformation (c. 1540).

2022 was a packed year for Toby. Not only was he instrumental in creating a major exhibition about the Magna Carta held in Washington DC, his latest book – ‘The Making of England: From Rome to Reformation’* – was also published.

The year was capped in December when Toby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The Society is the UK’s foremost learned society for historians, working to support research and the discipline. Fellows are elected by the Society’s governing Council in recognition of their contribution to historical scholarship.

The Fellowship allows Toby to use the letters FRHistS, granting him an internationally recognised academic status, access to the Society’s library and archives and a database of published transactions, and invitations to their seminar programme, workshops and training courses.

Toby joins around 3,500 other historians based in the UK and overseas named as Society Fellows. He says: “From a personal perspective, being made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society is a wonderful validation of my work as historian, teacher and writer for 25 years. Fellowship is granted according to a body of published articles or a substantive book, so this is a wonderful way of ‘topping off’ the publication of my most recent work.

“I believe it is also an accolade for University of Northampton to have academic staff who gain this sort of international standing and I hope it supports and encourages me to continue advancing my research career. More significantly, it grants me a real sense of belonging to the wider community of historians, writers and educators.”

*Find out more about Toby’s book.