The History of Ballads as News Media in Australia PhD Scholarship

Applications are invited for a PhD scholarship in The History of Ballads as News Media in Australia. The scholarship is supported by the Australian National University (ANU) and is part of Dr Una McIlvenna's Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship 2023-2027.

Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia 1550-1920 is an ARC supported study of the long history of song as a major medium of news dissemination in both Europe and Australia. Taking advantage of several recent major digitisation projects, Singing the News will unearth, study, and record songs in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian from the mid-16th through the early 20th century. It will reveal for the first time not only the universal, widespread nature of news-songs, but also show how audience participation in singing helped to create a consensus and social cohesion around topics that could potentially be controversial.

Central to this project is the demonstration of how the European tradition of balladry was exploited by the early Australian news industry. Focusing on 19th  century Australian newspapers, it will reveal how they commissioned songs to consciously invent a romanticised image of the fledgling colony. The PhD candidate will undertake a project on the use of balladry and ballad competitions in Australian newspaper collections in the 19th century. The candidate will identify, transcribe, index, and analyse news ballads in the National Library of Australia's Trove database of digitised Australian newspapers, analysing them in the context of the project's wider findings from other language and national traditions. The PhD candidate will also upload data regularly to the project's digital platform, continually building their skills in digital humanities. 

The PhD will be supervised by Dr Una McIlvenna, together with the project team's Digital Humanities Research Associate, with the PhD thus offering skills training in literary and historical analysis, digital humanities, research, writing, and database management. The successful candidate will be affiliated with ANU's School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (SLLL), which has a thriving English program and interdisciplinary research culture, and ANU's Centre for Australian Literary Culture, Humanities Research Centre, and Centre for Digital Humanities.

The successful applicant will also have the opportunity to work closely with members of the project’s Advisory Committee, who are specialists in Australian history, balladry, and media history. The project will thereby provide the PhD candidate with excellent opportunities to benefit from the advice of senior mentors, and to build their research networks in Australian media history and historical balladry. They will also attend domestic and international conferences with Dr McIlvenna, disseminating their findings to both national and international audiences, and gaining access to the Fellow’s extensive national and international networks.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to contact Dr Una McIlvenna at una.mcilvenna@anu.edu.au prior to applying.