Three members of the CEMS community have recently received awards for their work.

Dr Una McIlvenna’s book Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (The New Cultural History of Music series, Oxford University Press, 2022) won The Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2023 from the Folklore Society in November. Judges described the volume as “a rich, meticulously researched and highly readable survey of execution ballads from England, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Extensive primary source material is thoughtfully interpreted in order to highlight the role of song in communicating news, social values and shifting mores in early modern Western Europe.”

The book was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s General History Prize 2023.

Una has also been awarded a Paul Oskar Kristeller Research Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America for her project “Hatred in Print: The Pamphlet Explosion on the Death of Concino Concini, Marquis d’Ancre”. The fellowship will fund a trip to the archives in Paris.

Dr Claire Hansen has won the 2023 S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to Australian researchers and writers intending to study outside of Australia, leading to publishing a book relating to dramatic or non-dramatic English literature of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.

CEMS HDR candidate Barbara Taylor was awarded the Lloyd Davis Memorial Prize for her paper “Humming Water, Murky Dens: Sea-Room and Purgatory in Pericles and The Tempest” at the 2023 ANZSA (Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association) conference in December 2023. The prize is awarded to the best graduate essay submitted for inclusion on the program of the 2023 ANZSA conference.

 Congratulations Una, Claire and Barbara!