Announcements by Network Members
Call for Papers
Singing History:
Interdisciplinary Approaches
to Ballads and the Past
For centuries, the news was sung. As soon as a newsworthy event occurred, ballads were composed, set to familiar tunes, and passed on orally. Printed ballads were sold on busy streets and marketplaces by street singers, who would sing the song as a way of advertising their wares. Ballads combined news, entertainment, and moral lessons in a format designed for maximum dissemination, whatever the literacy rate. They are therefore excellent sources for examining how ordinary people – rather than just educated elites – were encouraged to understand the society in which they lived. Songs told the news of disasters, politics, crime and punishment, military conflicts, and sports. They also sang about workers and labour protests, emigration and new lands, and they told stories of heartbreak, loss, and victory. Ballads were often deliberately sensationalist, consciously seeking to manipulate our emotions.
This conference will explore not only this long-standing European tradition of mass media, but also trace its evolution – through transportation ballads and songs about convict shipwrecks – to 19th-century Australia, a land already rich with Indigenous musical culture. Here, topical songs were often printed in newspapers, and editors commissioned ballads as a way to invent a romanticised image of the fledgling colony. How did this European practice engage – or not – with Australian Indigenous culture, the longest sustained traditions of song in the world?
We invite talks and performances from a range of disciplines that will highlight the multi-media aspects of song and balladry in all its forms, including lyric, music, image, material form, performance, and practice in Europe, Australia, and beyond.
We are also interested in how the digital humanities have transformed our understanding of historical song. How can we use technologies and tools of the 21st century to bring songs from the past to a modern audience? How can existing databases, such as those documenting Australia's convict history, be linked to those cataloguing song, such as convict ballads? Trove has become an indispensable tool for contextualising the past, but how can we use it to connect and expand these linkages historically, contextually, and digitally?
This 2-day gathering at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, will bring together historians, literary scholars, singers, musicians, musicologists, art historians, folklorists and folk song practitioners, scholars in digital humanities, archivists, librarians, and anyone interested in topics such as, but not limited to:
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ballads, songs, and balladry
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how popular song figures in musicology
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folklore and folk song studies
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singers, songwriters, and the songwriting process
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the history of news, news media, and 'fake news'
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political history, military history, colonial history
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convict history, convict ballads
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Australian history, Indigenous history, diasporic histories (including
the many emigrant groups to Australia)
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music and nation-building, national and sporting anthems
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protest songs
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maritime and shipwreck history, sea shanties
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history of sports and sports songs
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digital history, digital humanities, digital cultural heritage
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archives, Trove, libraries (esp. digitised collections)
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print media, print culture
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visual material culture, broadsides
Keynote speakers include:
Professor Siv Gøril Brandtzæg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), expert in Comparative Literature, broadside ballads and digital humanities.
Dr Angela McShane (Warwick University), social and cultural historian of balladry in Britain.
The conference will also launch the database Singing the News, hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) at the Australian National University.
Submission Details:
Given the many disciplines that study song, we invite a range of conference formats: traditional papers and panels, but also lightning talks, workshops (such as singing, music or dance lessons), and performances – feel free to get in touch to discuss ideas you might have about presentation formats.
Please submit abstracts of c.250 words, plus a short bio (100 words) by 30 March 2027 to SingingHistory2027@gmail.com with the subject line “Singing History 2027 Proposal”. Notifications of acceptance will be provided by the end of May. If you need earlier confirmation for travel or funding purposes, write to SingingHistory2027@gmail.com.
A limited number of modest travel bursaries will be available for PhD/ECR scholars. If you are interested in applying for a bursary, please include a statement of need with your abstract which details your access to travel funding.
Conference organising committee: Una McIlvenna, Julianne Bell, and Madeleine Sargeant. This conference is an outcome of ARC FT230100537 'Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia 1550-1920'.
New Publication
Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1800
by Una McIlvenna
Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death.
Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.
New Publication
Sounding Prose: Music in the 17th-Century Dutch Novel
by Natascha Veldhorst
This book is about the presence of music in novels. More specifically, about music in the early modern novel, with an emphasis on seventeenth-century prose from The Netherlands. The essay provides a concise and an accessible introduction into the subject and presents an overview of this compelling new research area.
About the Author:
Natascha Veldhorst is Assistant Professor Arts and Culture Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands.
Further information about Natascha Veldhorst and her work, including Sounding Prose: Music in the 17th-Century Dutch Novel, is available here.
