It’s difficult to believe, but this time last week I had just arrived in Santa Barbara for my first ever visit to the USA. I flew into LAX and caught the airbus shuttle up the coast. As we came out of LA, the heavens opened on a hailstorm, followed by a beautiful, vivid rainbow. It took me some time to register that the ocean I was gazing on from the coach was the Pacific not the Atlantic, then I spotted some dolphins as the sun set over the sea. After travelling for around 26 hours, I arrived at the Best Western South Coast only to go straight back out to eat just down the road at the Nugget. After a nice meal, I retired to bed, with the poor weather forecast ringing in my ears.

The first session was on Grant Writing, the NEH, and EBBA, which was not, as it might sound, a session on how to write grant proposals based on the EBBA collections. David Marshall, Patricia Fumerton, and NEH EBBA Project Manager, Molly Hardy, talked about the history of the archive, it’s many NEH grants and the way the project was run. David Marshall described the project’s significant for humanities scholarship, while Molly Hardy pointed out that 9 NEH grants over 20 years is not normal – it reflects the contribution g EBBA and its ability to change over the years to stay relevant.

After the break it was time for Session 2: Mixing Genres. This was the panel I was speaking on, and I have to say that I was glad to be on so early in the proceedings, before the jet lag really had time to kick in. Anyway, the first speaker was Yujin Jang on “The ‘Shirburn’ Ballads and Receptions of Shakespeare’s Plays”. She was interested in how people experience Shakespeare, and reminded us that what seem to be obscure references to us were obvious to people at the time. She talked about the references to shaking off slumber in Ariel’s speech, which she argued made reference to a contemporary ballad with apocalyptic overtones. Next up was Firdevs Idil Kurtulan, who spoke on “Undone in Little Space: The Early Moderns Across Two Pamphlets and a Ballad”. She presented a cross textual reading of her witchcraft sources, noting that much of the witchcraft literature of the period was about demonologising “popular” magic according to clerical definition of witchcraft. The pamphlets and ballad on the same witchcraft story exist in a wider field and complicate silos in which we usually study our texts. Finally, I gave my paper on “Providence and Editorial in Early Modern Ballads”, in which I presented my early findings on my research into the role of providence in early modern news – essentially arguing that news of God’s activities in the world was the most important news there could be. It seemed to go down very well.

Session 3: Individuals Making Broadside Ballads opened with Angela McShane on Zoom describing her research into the life of one ballad printer,“Putting the ‘Popular’ into Political Song: Philip Brooksby, Ballad Maker Extraordinaire”. Madison Connaughton asked “‘WWMPD?’: What Would Martin Parker Do?” She argued that Parker’s ballads can give an insight into popular culture because he wrote about the same issues from a number of viewpoints, looking at a case study of the ways he presents women in his songs. Qingyu Wang spoke on the “Earl of Essex’s Posthumous Fame in Seventeenth-Century Ballads”, comparing the representation of his trial and execution in the state papers and ballads.