In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews Dr Sarah Grant, lead curator for the V&A's incredibly popular 'Marie Antoinette Style' exhibition. We'll discuss the exhibition, the inspiration behind it and what it tells us about Marie Antoinette and her legacy.

Guest Bio: Dr Sarah Grant is a Senior Curator in the Department of Art, Architecture, Photography & Design at the V&A. Sarah holds a doctorate in eighteenth-century French art from the University of Oxford and a Masters in eighteenth-century French decorative arts from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her books include Marie Antoinette Style; Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie-Antoinette’s Court; Toiles de Jouy: French printed cottons 1760–1830 and Style and Satire: Fashion in Print 1777-1927. Her exhibitions include Marie Antoinette Style; Modern Masters: Matisse, Picasso, Dali & Warhol and Fashion Fantasies.

If you missed the exhibition, you can still order and enjoy the exhibition catalogue!

Follow Sarah on Instagram: @sarahgrantcurator

In this episode, host Victoria Barlow interviews Dr Brooke Newman about her recent book The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas. A story hereto relatively unknown to the public (though largely accepted in academic circles), the discussion delves into how, throughout the centuries, the British monarchy heavily invested into and greatly profited from the Atlantic Slave Trade. Dealing with such a contentious but important topic, Brooke explains why she wrote it for wider audiences, and the significance that this decision might have for the royal family.

Guest bio:

Dr. Brooke Newman is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She specializes in the history of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with a focus on slavery and its legacies. She is the author of the award-winning book, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale, 2018), and The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas (Mariner, 2026). Her writing and research have been featured in the Guardian, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and Smithsonian Magazine, and she has served as a historical expert for HBO's Last Week Tonight, Vox, the BBC, and NPR, among others.

Follow Brooke Newman on social media:

@drbrookenewman [instagram]

@brookenewman.bsky.social [Bluesky]

In this podcast we delve into the story of female sovereignty and chiefly women in Aotearoa New Zealand via the story of Meri Te Tai Mangakahia and Queen Victoria.

Our guest speaker Dr. Miranda Johnson is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America. Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association. She is currently finishing a book tentatively titled: Redeemer Nation: Myth, History, and the Limits of Biculturalism in a Settler Colonial Society. This book examines the fraught imaginary of ‘biculturalism’ in Aotearoa New Zealand, between the 1970s-2020s, paying particular attention to history-making and changing historical consciousness over the past five decades. With Associate Professor Paerau Warbrick she is collating a collection of Māori petitions to the colonial New Zealand and British imperial governments in the nineteenth century, funded by a University of Otago Research Grant.

You can find Miranda’s chapter related to this podcast under the title:

"Chiefly Women: Queen Victoria, Meri Mangakahia, and the Māori Parliament." In Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, 228-245 (Manchester University Press, 2016).

For Miranda’s full list of publications, see: https://www.otago.ac.nz/history/our-people-in-history/associate-professor-miranda-johnson

In this episode, host Victoria Barlow interviews Lionel Arsac about the recent exhibition at the Palace of Versailles: The Grand Dauphin (1661-1711). Son of a king, father of a king and never king. This exhibition shines a light on the relatively unknown life and career of Louis of France (son and heir of the famous Louis XIV). Their discussion outlines the importance of remembering this interesting figure and explores the organisation of such an extraordinary exhibition.

Guest Bio:

Lionel Arsac has been curator of sculptures at the Palace of Versailles since 2017 and, since 2019, head of preventive conservation of the collections. In addition to numerous articles on the sculptures of Versailles, Lionel has taken an interest in subjects as diverse as the uses of oriental carpets at Court, Proust and Versailles, and, more recently, the sculpture collections of Ange Laurent La Live de Jully. Lionel has curated several exhibitions at the Palace of Versailles: Rediscovered Masterpieces. Zephyr and Flora and Abundance (2022), Louis XIV by Bernini, Genius and Majesty (2025) and, recently, The Grand Dauphin. Son of a king, father of a king and never king.

Follow Lionel on Instagram: @lionelarsac

The mini series within the Royal Studies Podcast on Monarchy & Money is hosted by Charlotte Backerra from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and Cathleen Sarti from the University of Oxford in the UK. In these Monarchy & Money episodes, they are talking with scholars on why economic questions are important to understand monarchical rule, and how royals are interacting with the economies of their kingdoms and beyond their territories. They are also always happy to hear about research into economic, financial, and business activities of monarchies and dynastic rulers of all kind.

Guest Bio:

After completing his doctoral thesis Servants of Fortune in Lund, Fabian Persson is now Professor in History at Linnaeus University in Sweden. His main expertise lies in the history of the early modern Swedish court but he has also written on patronage, corruption, dynasty, royal bodies alive as well as dead and court mourning. He is currently finishing monographs on hunting at court, space at court, and “Modernizing Monarchy”. He is also editing an anthology on court ordinances and another on female succession.

His publications in English include Survival and Revival. Sweden's Court and Monarchy, 1718 to 1930 (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), Women at the Early Modern Swedish Court: Power, Risk, and Opportunity (Amsterdam University Press 2021), and Resilience and Recovery at Royal Courts, 1200–1840 (edited volume together with Cinzia Recca and Munro Price, Palgrave Macmillan 2023).

The mini series within the Royal Studies Podcast on Monarchy & Money is hosted by Charlotte Backerra from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and Cathleen Sarti from the University of Oxford in the UK. In these Monarchy & Money episodes, they are talking with scholars on why economic questions are important to understand monarchical rule, and how royals are interacting with the economies of their kingdoms and beyond their territories. They are also always happy to hear about research into economic, financial, and business activities of monarchies and dynastic rulers of all kind.

Guest Bio:

Veronika Hyden-Hanscho holds the prestigious Elise-Richter Fellowship awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The topic of her current project is “Income, Management and Economic Thinking. Noble Entrepreneurship in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy” and focuses on the Habsburg aristocracy as a driving force for economic development. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Klagenfurt. In 2011, she earned a PhD at the University of Graz (Austria). She was Lecturer for Austrian Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland) and Research Associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna from 2013 to 2023 as well as visiting scholar at the University of Ghent (Belgium). She is the author of ‘Reisende, Migranten, Kulturmanager. Mittlerpersönlichkeiten zwischen Frankreich und dem Wiener Hof (1630–1730)’ (Stuttgart, 2013) and co-editor of ‘Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond. Identities, Polities and Glocal Economies’ (Singapore 2023).

The mini series within the Royal Studies Podcast on Monarchy & Money is hosted by Charlotte Backerra from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and Cathleen Sarti from the University of Oxford in the UK. In these Monarchy & Money episodes, they are talking with scholars on why economic questions are important to understand monarchical rule, and how royals are interacting with the economies of their kingdoms and beyond their territories. They are also always happy to hear about research into economic, financial, and business activities of monarchies and dynastic rulers of all kind.

Guest Bio:

Katia Wright completed her PhD at the University of Winchester in 2022 with her thesis regarding five English queens across the fourteenth century as landowners, and more specifically their dower lands. Katia has worked on several joint projects and publications including co-editing a special edition of the Royal Studies Journal and her chapter on understanding the dowers of England’s medieval queens. She is part of the project on the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe (also known as the Queen's Resources). Katia is also the Assistant Curator (Archives) of the AGC Museum, Winchester.

In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews the editor of the cluster ‘Diplomacy as Performative Politics in the Early Modern Courts’, as featured in the December 2025 issue of the Royal Studies Journal (issue 12.2). We discuss the inspiration behind this theme and delve into the contents of the cluster and its original and innovative approach to early modern diplomacy, rulership and courts.

Guest Bio/Info:

Dr Kristen Vitale Engel is an early modern historian who specializes in the early Tudor state, performative politics, and late medieval and early modern European court culture. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation (thesis), titled “Henrician Spectacle: Courtly Festivity as Performative Politics in Early Tudor England, 1485-1533” in April 2025 at the University of Connecticut. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History in the School of Graduate, Online and Continuing Education at Fitchburg State University. Kristen is the Submissions Editor for the Royal Studies Journal, the Editor-in-Chief of “The Court Observer” for the Society of Court Studies, the International Ambassador (US) for HistoryLab+ in partnership with the Institute of Historical Research, a podcast host for the “Early Modern History” channel on the New Books Network, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Forthcoming publication of interest: “The Performance of Power Relations: Early Henrician Courtly Dance,” in eds., Janet Dickinson and Diana Lucia Gomez-Chacon, The Embodied Court in the Premodern World; Understanding the Physicality, Performativity and Lifecycle of Bodies at Court in Europe and Beyond, 1400-1800, in series Courts and Courtiers in a Global Context Comparative Approaches to the Study of the Mechanisms and Personalities of Pre-Modern Court Cultures, vol. 4, Brepols, 2026.

Follow Kristen on X: @kristenmvitale