Ice skating at Lytham

I am a freelance historian and Lecturer in Early Modern History at Lancaster University, where I work 2 days a week with a Teaching and Scholarship focus. Prior to having my Lancaster casual contracts converted to an indefinite position, I also held similar positions at Liverpool Hope and Edge Hill, and for two years I was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton. I work mainly on Tudor and Stuart history, and in particular, sixteenth-century ballads in print, manuscript and the oral tradition.  My current research investigates the ballads associated with the Pilgrimage of Grace, as well as working on two smaller projects around news and providence, and the links between ballads and pamphlets.  I’m also beginning preliminary research into the links between sixteenth-century ballads, psalms and epitaphs and into perceptions of good health in early modern ballads.

My first book, Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England was published by Routledge in 2018 as part of their ‘Material Readings in Early Modern Culture’ series.  It combines my big passions, history and music, into a 282-page whole. It provides a musical analysis of ballad tunes, as well as demonstrating that during the period 1530-1570, a time of political, religious and social upheaval, ballads were a medium through which people could debate the causes and consequences of the changes that they experienced in the world around them. In 2021 I published an edition of John Balshaw’s Jigge: Revelry and Royalism in Restoration Lancashire, a little known piece of musical theatre written in late seventeenth-century Brindle, near Preston. My most recent book is an international collaboration on the transmission of news, Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe.

I also love to sing, and I aim to take my ABRSM Diploma as a classical soprano.  One of my (few) claims to fame is that Babara Robotham once described my voice as “pure bel canto”! I have performed as soprano soloist for choral works and at weddings, as well as recording a folk music CD, ‘Aisling’s Dream’, with my former band, Triptych.

I  am chair of the editorial board of the Historical Association’s general members’ journal, The Historian. I am a Trustee of the Association and was appointed Associate Vice-President for three years in 2016. In 2021, I was made an Honorary Fellow of the HA, and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Higher Education Academy. I am also a qualified secondary school teacher.