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Society for the History of Natural History


Awards, Honours and Medals

The Patron's Review


The SHNH Patron’s Review

The SHNH Patron’s Review, in association with Sir David Attenborough OM CH FRS, the Society’s Patron, is an opportunity for an outstanding young researcher (or a small team of researchers) to write a review that advances the Society’s objects, namely “the historical and bibliographical study of all branches of natural history, for all periods and cultures”.

The nomination for the Patron’s Review is from Council and the recipient is invited to write the essay by our Patron Sir David Attenborough.

The essay is normally published in the Society’s journal Archives of Natural History following normal peer review and editorial processes.


  • Pichayapat Naisupap

Between symbolic and material: global entanglements in the Dutch East India Company’s knowledge and management of elephants in early modern Ceylon.
Archives of Natural History, April 2026, 53 (1): 000.

  • Elsa Panciroli
Making do with less: fieldwork by the first female recipients of the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund between 1905–1950
Archives of Natural History, October 2024, 51 (2): 386-416.
  • Elle Larsson
“On deposit”: animal acquisition at the Zoological Society of London (1870-1910).
Archives of Natural History, April 2021, 48 (1): 1-21.
  • David. A. Lowther
The art of classification: Brian Houghton Hodgson and the “Zoology of Nipal”.
Archives of Natural History, April 2019, 46 (1): 1-23. See also Hodgson and the “Zoology of Nipal”.
  • Susannah Gibson
The careering naturalists: creating career paths in natural history, 1790–1830.
Archives of Natural History, October 2017, 44 (2): 195-214.
  • Alice Marples & Victoria R. M. Pickering
Exploring cultures of collecting in the early modern world.
Archives of Natural History, April 2016, 43 (1): 1-20.
  • Joanna Henley
The role of the moving image in natural history.
Archives of Natural History,
April 2013, 40 (1): 52-71.
  • Sachiko Kusukawa
The role of images in the development of Renaissance natural history.
Archives of Natural History
, October 2011, 38 (2): 189-213.