I am Lecturer in Early Modern History at Liverpool Hope University. The road to Hope has been a long and, at times, hard one. Prior to gaining my full time job, I worked part time as a teaching and scholarship lecture at Lancaster University and before that, I worked on hourly paid contracts at Lancaster, Liverpool Hope and Edge Hill. 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 a smaller project on the links between ballads and pamphlets. 

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 one of my (few) claims to fame is that Barbara 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’ magazine, The Historian. I am a former 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.