Priya Atwal nominated for Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for the Breakthrough Researcher Award
Dr Priya Atwal has been shortlisted in the 2026 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for the Breakthrough Researcher Award for Leading the Oxford Community History hub. Judging panels from a number of University divisions and offices considered the 170 nominations across eleven award categories.
Community history is historical research that is conducted outside of university spaces, and though often overlooked, it is of vital importance to furthering our knowledge of under-represented topics and social perspectives. It generates historical insight grounded in the needs, interests, and identities of our local communities. It also provides place-based understandings of the impact and dynamics of complex societal, political and environmental issues – ranging from Oxfordshire’s stark health inequalities to the regional impact of the climate crisis. Since 2020, Dr Priya Atwal has been leading the Faculty’s of History’s Community History Hub: from its start-up as a pilot programme through to its current status as a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary programme that stimulates and supports Oxford community-led historical projects. As an early career researcher (DPhil 2017) and on a fixed-term contract that has cycled through insecure funding, Priya has led, coordinated, and supported the development of the Community Hub since its start to its current success. Under her leadership, the Community History Hub now hosts a range of community-led projects and activities; institutes Common Cause research principles; has crafted and provides a Community History Toolkit to support Community History projects; and is developing a regional network of civic-minded institutions across England; while its projects and methods are now being used as models for community history in other institutions (e.g. in the University of Graz’s Global and Community History module).
In 2025 alone, Priya and the Hub worked with a range of local African-Caribbean organisations and the City and County councils to preserve community heritage; to develop an open-access digital archive on the history of Oxford’s car industry; and to support a programme that outlines the hundred-year-old experience of nature-based education at the Wytham and Hill End Outdoor Education Centre. All research projects follow the principles of Common Cause, using reciprocal and fair knowledge exchange and committed to strengthening community projects as well as sustainability and legacy. Priya and the Hub also host a number of public events: in Michaelmas 2025 they ran a programme of research seminars and training workshops given by community and academic historians (held at the Museum of Oxford), all of which were fully booked and attended by local county residents and University researchers.
The development of the Community History Hub has not been straightforward. With the support of the History Faculty, TORCH, and Humanities Impact, Central PCER, and OPEN teams, Priya initiated community listening exercises, a joint community-academic steering committee, and has continued to refine the model for ethical and impactful community-led research and outputs. As a result, the Hub has used evaluation, training, and best-practice sharing to re-shape the research environment in the History Faculty to better facilitate institutional and community partnerships. For example, all current projects have paid internships and training opportunities for both University postgraduate students and members of the local community, in a first for the History Faculty’s recruitment models.
