Home

Blog Posts

  • Additions and Ornaments to the Bare Grant of a Living: Elizabeth Gaskell, the ‘Manchester Guardian’ and Cultural Value in 1914

    Originally posted on misplacedhabits: When doing some research for a small project I am involved in, I came across this wonderful passage on the value of the arts in the Manchester Guardian, written in the context of a campaign to purchase Mrs Gaskell’s house for the city after her daughter, Meta, had died in 1913.…

  • Juggling

    Juggling, I have discovered this week, isn’t easy.  I can only assume that this time last year I was so taken up with the prospect of moving house that the PhD took a back seat to packing boxes and playing with my children.  I didn’t have my summer panel meeting until the middle of August…

  • Psalm Culture and the Politics of Translation

    This week I finally have something a bit different to say.  I am aware, you see, that writing a blog about writing a PhD is a bit repetitive: “read some ballads, thought about the music, wrote about some ballads, went to a supervision meeting, did some more research, wrote a bit more, read some secondary…

  • Summer Holidays

    Yesterday, my three children broke up for the summer.  This will have a significant, negative impact on the amount of work I get done, of course, but that was always part of the deal.  My summer action plan contains lots of little bits of work that can be broken off part way through, like transcriptions,…

  • Summer Panel Meeting

    This week I had my fourth panel meeting, which was a very interesting experience.  I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoyed it, but it was certainly stimulating and it wasn’t quite so scary as previous ones had been.  I’d sent in a chapter on putting ballads back together with their music, a short piece of writing…