Una McIlvenna
Author
Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, and has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London. A literary and cultural historian, she researches the early modern and nineteenth-century pan-European tradition of singing the news, and the history of crime and punishment, looking at songs in English, French, German, Dutch and Italian. Her monograph Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (OUP, 2022) explores the phenomenon of the execution ballad, songs that spread the news of condemned criminals and their often ghastly ends. This is accompanied by her website ExecutionBallads.com which features recordings of some of these songs. She has published articles on news-singing in Past & Present, Renaissance Studies, Media History, Parergon, and Huntington Library Quarterly, and is a co-founder of the international Song Studies Network.
Haunting Songs of the Condemned: Singing The News of Executions with …
Step into the streets of Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, where news of criminals' deeds and their ultimate fate was delivered through compelling songs. These execution ballads, often sold on bustling stree...