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This is the first of a short series of posts about my trip to Utrecht, to the EDPOP conference. After my delightful trip to the EDPOP Turku workshop, where my panel prepared its ideas, I was really looking forward to visiting Utrecht for the full conference, European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture: A Comparative Approach. …

The eagle-eyed among you (if indeed anyone other than me ever looks at the list of what I’m reading – they probably don’t!) will have spotted that I’ve been reading some rather unusual books lately.  And a lot of them.  That’s because I was asked to be a judge for the Historical Association’s Young Quills…

At the beginning of May, the North West Early Modern Seminar met at Lancaster University.  In the past there have been two twenty minute papers and several 5 minute presentations which briefly introduced research topics.  This session was different in having 3 twenty minute papers. The first was given by Prof. Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster), on…

Shortly after my book came out, I received an email inviting me to take part in a collaborative paper for a panel on news at the EDPOP conference in Utrecht in June.  Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.  (My fiend has recently pointed out that I appear incapable of saying no.  He’s probably…

Well, the academic one at least. Over the last couple of weeks, on my various commutes, I have watched the countryside grow gradually greener, which is very cheering.  On Tuesday evening, I had my final session with my Liverpool Hope University students at Holy Cross College, one of whom kindly made me this card and…

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,…