For a while now, I’ve been preparing for the MedRen conference in Maynooth in the summer.  The research has been slotted in between my various teaching sessions and all the commuting, and it very quickly progressed beyond the conference paper itself.  I’ve nearly finished the first draft of an article, which I hope will be…

While I haven’t been teaching lately, I’ve been writing, and this morning I submitted an application for a Society for Renaissance Studies postdoctoral fellowship to work on epitaphs, ballads and psalms in sixteenth-century England.  A couple of years ago I wrote an article for Literature Compass on verse epitaphs of sixteenth-century women, and noticed that…

So now it’s the Easter vacation and I’m up to my eyeballs in music.  I’m thoroughly enjoying doing something that’s closely linked to what I’ve done up to now, but feels refreshingly different, mainly because about a month ago, I hadn’t really thought about why music was printed on the broadside of A New Ballade…

Back before Christmas, in the middle of copy-editing, I received an invitation to submit a proposal for a panel at the MedRen Music Conference in Maynooth in the summer; I accepted and hastily cobbled something together: ‘Mere Claptrap Jumble’: Music and the 16th Century Broadside Ballad A New Ballade of a Lover is the earliest…

As I write, it’s about 6 weeks since my book came out and the Easter vacation, which is the first time I’ve had chance to sit down and think about doing some research since the beginning of the year.  Actually, it must be longer than that, given that I spent Christmas proofreading the book…  Anyway,…