Category: Uncategorized
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John Balshaw’s Jig – an update
I’ve recently been putting the final touches to my next book – my publication of my transcription of John Balshaw’s Jig, with the context around it too. The readers suggested somequite radical structural changes which I worked on before Easter, but I think it is much improved for the process. Given the trouble that I…
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Sound Affects II
Last week, I was really pleased to be able to attend the second day of the Sound Affects II workshop, organised by Rachel Willie and Emilie Murphy for their Soundscapes in the Early Modern World research network. The first paper was given by Wayne Weaver, a PhD student at Cambridge. His ‘Musical Performance Commentaries and…
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Gender, Authority and the Image of Queenship
Just before the end of 2020, my article ‘Gender, Authority and the Image of Queenship in English and Scottish Ballads, 1553–1603‘ came out in History. It was based mainly on a paper that I gave a couple of years ago to the EFDSS Broadside Day in Glasgow. Many of you will know that Mary I…
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Social History Society job
I’m really pleased to say that two weeks ago, I was appointed as the new administrator for the Social History Society. Most of the time, it’s only going to be one day a week, but for the first time in many, many years, I’ve got a small but steady and reliable year-round income (at least…
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Copy and Paste
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…
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2020-21
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…!).…
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Summer 2020
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…
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Singing the News in Paperback
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…
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Teaching on the EAP
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…
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MedRen 2020 Part 4
This is the fourth in a series of posts about the Virtual Medieval and Renaissance Music conference, which should have been held in Edinburgh. For me, this was one of the unexpected boons of the Covid-19 pandemic – I wouldn’t have been able to attend in person, but I was really glad of the opportunity…
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