I’ve spent pretty much all week copying and pasting. I’ve been collating the words to hundreds of broadside ballads into a single document, so that I can find them when I need them. It’s the first step towards beginning my new research projects – whichever one I go for first, I needed to expand my…

And so I begin what might well be my final year of working in the academy. The main focus of my teaching this time will be two seminar groups on Hist100, the first year core course, which are taking place face to face (well, at least to begin with…. we’ll see how long it lasts…!).…

It’s been a strange summer. There have been no holidays with historical aspects to blog about, and only a couple of conferences that I attended to write about. I’ve hardly left the house since March… I’ve done a lot of home schooling, and this has carried on in September despite my children returning to school…

I’m really pleased that this week, my monograph Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England comes out in paperback. I first got an inkling of this a couple of months ago, when I came across the pre-order button on the Routledge website by accident. At the time, I hadn’t been contacted by the publishers so…

It’s been a busy few weeks, and the scheduled blog posts ran out while my attention was elsewhere because I’ve been teaching full time on the English for Academic Purposes course at Lancaster University. The course is for overseas students to introduce them to academic skills such as essay writing, referencing and collaborative presentations, so…