The Royal Historical Society (RHS) has elected Simon Mitton to its Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship.

Since it was founded in 1868 the RHS has become the foremost learned society in the UK working with professional historians and advancing the scholarly study of the past.

Simon, a Life Fellow at St Edmund’s, said: “I am very honoured by this election, which is in recognition of my recent academic books and peer-reviewed papers documenting the history of astronomy in the twentieth century. Recently I’ve been working on the cosmologist Georges Lemaître who resided at St Edmund’s House 1923 – 24, while working with Sir Arthur Eddington on the implications for astronomy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The result of this collaboration was Lemaître’s concept of a Fireworks Universe that began in the explosion of a cosmic primeval atom. For this he is now universally acknowledged as the father of the Big Bang theory for the origin of our universe.”

Simon’s current work is focused on the history of our understanding the dynamic interior of planet Earth, for which he has received a research support grant from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, USA.