CEMS is delighted to welcome our new co-deputy directors Associate Professor Una McIlvenna and Dr Amelia Dale.
Una is Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2023-2027 and Associate Professor in English at ANU. Her research interests lie in the fields of early modern cultural and literary history, particularly the tradition of singing the news. Her Future Fellowship project ‘Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia, 1550-1920’ explores how ballads were a primary medium for disseminating information about newsworthy events. Her most recent book, Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (OUP, 2022) looks at the fascinating and long-lived tradition of execution ballads, songs which told the news of crime and their usually ghastly punishments in sensationalist and graphic terms. The book is accompanied by Una’s digital platform, Execution Ballads.
Amelia is a Lecturer in English at ANU. Her research centres on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, with particular interests in book history, gender and genre, and histories of the body. Her monograph, The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Bucknell University Press, 2019), examines British adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote to argue that literature was envisaged as imprinting the reader’s mind, character, and body in gendered ways. Her recent work includes a collaborative project on the long-running catalogue of London sex workers, Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794) and the book chapter “Conceptual Richardson” in Revisiting Richardson (Bucknell University Press, 2025). She is editor of The Shandean and interviews editor for poetry journal Rabbit.
Welcome Una and Amelia!