Dr Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at Australian National University. Her research focuses on early modern cultural and literary history, and she is the author of Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I’m an academic historian, but I started late: I was a long-haul flight attendant before that. I went back to uni in my late 20s, studying literature and French, and ended up doing a PhD in Renaissance Studies, looking at the intersections of literature and history. My PhD thesis looked at satirical attacks on the 16th-century French court of Catherine de Medici, in particular, polemical and often pornographic attacks (usually in the form of verse) on her so-called ‘flying squadron’, an invented myth about a pseudo-harem of ladies-in-waiting that it was claimed she ordered to seduce politically important noblemen during the Wars of Religion. I proved it was all a heterosexual male fantasy. It’s the stuff they’re using for that Starz TV show, The Serpent Queen (which I have NOT watched).
But along the way I realised that a lot of the verses I was looking at were in fact songs, and so when I got offered my first postdoc researching early modern public execution, I decided that my ‘angle’ on that well-researched topic would be the ballads that were written about executions. I had found a handful, and made a presumptuous guess that there would be more. In fact, there are more than I know what to do with! I revealed that there was a pan-European tradition of singing the news that lasted from the invention of the printing press to the early 20th century.