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,…

The first topic on the early modern section of the course that I teach for Liverpool Hope is Renaissance kingship, and I like to start by getting the students drawing: first Henry VIII, then Henry VII.  The idea is that it brings home to them the power of the image – they all know what…

Originally posted on The Research Whisperer: This article first appeared in Funding Insight on 7 December 2017 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit http://www.researchprofessional.com. Photo by Wu Yi | unsplash.com For as long as I’ve been in academia, one of the staples of scholarly life has…

Over the last few months, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling around getting to work.  I’m not fond of driving, it’s never been something I particularly enjoy, but living in the back of beyond means that there’s really little alternative.  When I wrote Over the Next Hill, I thought I would be doing a…