Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and North America is runner up in the Katharine Briggs Award 2015

We’re delighted to hear that David Atkinson and Steve Roud’s edited volume: Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and North America is the runner up in this year’s Katharine Briggs Award.

The Katharine Briggs Folklore Award is an annual book prize established by the Folklore Society to encourage the study of folklore, to help improve the standard of folklore publications in Britain and Ireland, to establish The Folklore Society as an arbiter of excellence, and to commemorate the life and work of the distinguished scholar Katharine Mary Briggs (1898-1980; Society president 1969-1972).

Here are the judges’ comments about the book:

“A wide-ranging, masterly study of the complex interface between street literature, in the form of printed broadsides, and folk song as performed in nineteenth century Britain, North America and Ireland. An important contribution to debate on the relationship between printed and oral popular culture.”

In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into ‘street literature’ – that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature’s interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.

Contents:  Introduction, Steve Roud; Was there really a ‘mass extinction of old ballads’ in the romantic period?, David Atkinson; Birmingham broadsides and oral tradition, Roy Palmer; The Newcastle song chapbooks, Peter Wood; Forgotten broadsides and the song tradition of Scots travellers, Chris Wright; Welsh balladry and literacy, Ffion Mair Jones; Ballads and ballad singers: Samuel Lover’s tour of Dublin in 1830, John Moulden; Henry J. Wehman and cheap print in late 19th-century America, Norm Cohen; ‘I’d have you to buy it and learn it’: Sabine Baring-Gould, his fellow collectors, and street literature, Martin Graebe; The popular ballad and the book trade: ‘Bateman’s Tragedy’ versus ‘The Demon Lover’, David Atkinson; Mediating Maria Marten: comparative and contextual studies of the Red Barn ballads, Tom Pettitt; ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’: re-contextualizing a ‘locally’ composed Newfoundland folk song, Anna Kearney Guigné; Select bibliography; Index.

About the Editors: David Atkinson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK. Steve Roud is an independent scholar in the UK.

Reviews:

‘Here is a very important book for anyone who is interested in the origins and evolution of folk song. …essential if you have any interest in this subject.’   English Dance and Song Magazine

‘This is a well-balanced collection, exhibiting throughout the results of careful research, drawing considered conclusions. Ballad studies are thriving, and it is a welcome addition to the field.’   Folk Music Journal

‘The essays are detailed and informative – I learned a lot from them … Street Ballads takes a large step beyond the pieties of authenticity that have often constrained scholarship on ballads, and it provides a model for future investigations into the complex histories of a tantalising cultural form.’   SHARP News

User Experience training for librarians

• Do you really know your users?
• Do you want to find out what they really need?
• Do you want to find out what they are really doing?

For some time now interest has been growing in a set of research methods that are far more revealing and detailed than surveys. What is more they’re far more interesting and fun for our users to engage with too. Under the banner heading of UX (User Experience) these methods can help us gain a far greater understanding of how our users study and research in the 21st Century.

UXLibs-in-a-day is a highly practical and interactive workshop which explores User Experience (UX) research methods and applications which can be used to uncover what our users really need and do. Participants will have the opportunity to try out many ethnographic approaches for themselves, evaluate application in their own libraries and gain crucial insight into the kind of rich data they can derive. They will also be exposed to idea generation and design-thinking methods and consider the value of divergent as opposed to convergent thinking. After a very successful pilot day at CILIP HQ, Ashgate author Andy Priestner is now offering five more practical and intensive day-long UX  workshops at which you’ll learn these methods and their applications first-hand. If you’re interested then sign up for the first workshop in Cambridge on Saturday 28th November or register your interest in attending one of the other workshops taking place in Copenhagen, London, Maynooth (Ireland), Newcastle and Birmingham in the coming months

Feedback:

‘Engaging, innovative, inspiring. Makes me want to go back and do this!’

‘A very useful and practical session that focused on real-world methodologies rather than the purely theoretical and conceptual. Andy is a great presenter – very professional and effective.’

‘Really positive, worthwhile and usable. Inspired to try lots of techniques back at work. Thank you! One of the best training workshops I have attended.’

Failing that, pre-order the book, coming out in Spring 2016, User Experience in Libraries by Andy Priestner and Matt Borg

And don’t forget to look at Andy’s last book:

Personalising Library Services in Higher Education  by Andy Priestner and Elizabeth Tilley

Triumph and Disaster: Medals of the Sun King at the British Museum.

Three hundred years ago the seventy-two year reign of the Louis XIV (1643-1715) came to an end at Versailles when he lost his battle with a gangrenous leg. Museums and galleries around the world are celebrating this important anniversary with exhibitions that showcase fine and decorative arts of every media commissioned, collected, and inspired by the Sun King. The British Museum’s modest offering Triumph and Disaster: Medals of the Sun King is, to my mind, the most important of them all.

But why should we be looking at medals, when there so many wonderful Louis-Quatorze palaces, gardens, paintings, sculptures and tapestries to marvel at? For the majority of museumgoers commemorative medals, with their esoteric allegories and terse inscriptions, probably look like the oversized coins of an outmoded currency; they are the things you glance at quickly on the way to finding something more seductive. Yet in my book, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past published by Ashgate this September, I argue that medals provide the key to understanding the best-known images and objects that were produced to decorate the Sun King’s palaces.

Medals were at the center of a long-standing project sponsored by the king to document his reign for posterity. They were made in imitation of the ancient Greek and Roman coins from which early-modern antiquarians gleaned information about the past. Louis XIV’s image-makers designed medals to transmit historical information to a future audience, and so they are the ideal objects for us to reflect upon this anniversary year.

The project to document the history of Louis XIV visually aimed to control the future reception of the king’s legacy, to ensure that he would be remembered in a positive light. The exhibition at the British museum reveals a fundamental flaw with this strategy, however. Counter-propaganda medals made in Holland, included in this exhibition, use the same overblown imagery created to celebrate Louis XIV to vilify him. This ‘war of medals,’ as it has been called, shows us just how potent these diminutive sculptures were once deemed to be, with the Dutch working to set the record straight in the same medium designed to ensure the Sun King’s immortality.

Little did those working to construct these historical identities of Louis XIV realize that the fashion for medals would not last.

Today medals occupy an equivocal space in museums, placed in sculpture departments in some, but under numismatics in others. The latter is a distinguished but rarefied discipline – the province of collectors and connoisseurs – where the study of medals and coins has coalesced. Too rarely are these miniature masterpieces brought to the attention of the academy or the public. I hope that my study and Triumph and Disaster: Medals of the Sun King at the British Museum will help to rehabilitate these fascinating little objects, and encourage people to look at them again with fresh eyes.

Robert Wellington is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University. His book, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past is available now.

The exhibition Triumph and Disaster: Medals of the Sun King runs at The British Museum until November 15th. Entry is free.

Museums Association Annual Conference and Exhibition

The Museums Association Annual Conference & Exhibition is just around the corner and this year it is taking place at the ICC in Birmingham from 5^th-6^th November.

The Museums Association Annual Conference & Exhibition is the largest event of its kind for museum and heritage professionals in Europe with over 1,500 attendees from all over the world coming together to discuss the key issues affecting the sector. http://www.museumsassociation.org/conference/about-birmingham-2015

Ashgate author Helen Chatterjee will be speaking about university partnerships and no doubt mentioning her new book Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education

Helen and co-editor Leonie Hannan discuss the use of museum collections as a path to learning and a new new pedagogy for higher education.

‘How can objects in museums and elsewhere be of value in higher education? This book is an invaluable, much needed extension of our understandings of object-centred learning into the tertiary level. Its thoughtful case studies demonstrate the role of objects – of myriad kinds – and multisensory, experiential engagements with them, in inspiring and enabling university students.’

Sandra Dudley, University of Leicester, UK

A small selection of Ashgate books will be on display at the Taylor and Francis exhibition stand. Delegates will also benefit from a 30% discount on selected highlights from our Museum Studies list. If you’re attending, look out for the flyer in your packs.

For anyone who can’t attend in person, you can still take advantage of the 30% conference discount when you order through our website and use the promotion code A15JVB30.

Browse our Museum Studies, Heritage and Cultural Management highlights and don’t forget to quote the discount code A15JVB30

2015 Transport Geography Dissertation Prize awarded to Sam Comber

Posted by Katy Crossan, Senior Commissioning Editor, Geography

We are pleased to announce the winner of the Royal Geographical Society’s Transport Geography Research Group 2015 undergraduate dissertation prize, sponsored by Ashgate, is Sam Comber from the University of Birmingham for his dissertation ‘Assessing the Impacts of Rail Investments on Housing Prices’. This research evaluates home-buyers’ willingness to pay for rail investments using the example of the Crossrail intervention in Ealing that will improve the Great Western Main Line’s service provisions. The judges were impressed with the advanced statistical approach and overall methodology which went ‘well beyond those normally seen in undergraduate geography dissertations’ and felt that the dissertation overall was ‘extremely high quality’.

Ashgate’s Transport and Mobility book series is run in conjunction with the Transport Geography Research Group.

New Series Announcement and Call for Proposals for Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Space

Posted by Katy Crossan, Commissioning Editor for Geography

New Series Announcement and Call for Book Proposals:
Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Space

Series Editors: Rainer Kazig, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, France, Damien Masson, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France and Paul Simpson, Plymouth University, UK

We are currently seeking book proposals for research monographs and edited collections which engage with the key questions outlined below.

Research on ambiances and atmospheres has grown significantly in recent years in a range of disciplines, including Francophone architecture and urban studies, German research related to philosophy and aesthetics, and a growing range of Anglophone research on affective atmospheres within human geography and sociology.

This series offers a forum for research that engages with questions around ambiances and atmospheres in exploring their significances in understanding social life. Each book in the series advances some combination of theoretical understandings, practical knowledges and methodological approaches. More specifically, a range of key questions which contributions to the series seek to address includes:

• In what ways do ambiances and atmospheres play a part in the unfolding of social life in a variety of settings?

• What kinds of ethical, aesthetic, and political possibilities might be opened up and cultivated through a focus on atmospheres/ambiences?

• How do actors such as planners, architects, managers, commercial interests and public authorities actively engage with ambiances and atmospheres or seek to shape them? How might these ambiances and atmospheres be re-shaped towards critical ends?

• What original forms of representations can be found today to (re)present the sensory, the atmospheric, the experiential?  What sort of writing, modes of expression, or vocabulary is required? What research methodologies and practices might we employ in engaging with ambiances and atmospheres?

For further information please contact the Series Editors, Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson and Paul Simpson.

20% off all Literary Studies titles – today only!

To celebrate National Poetry Day, we are offering 20% off all our Literary Studies titles… though time is a-wasting… the offer is only valid today (8th October 2015)!

To claim your discount simply enter the code C15JRS20 when placing your order!

View all of our Literary Studies titles here.

Transport Geography Research Group’s Dissertation Prize

Posted by Katy Crossan, Senior Commissioning Editor, Geography

Ashgate are pleased to sponsor the prize awarded by the Royal Geographical Society’s Transport Geography Research Group for the best undergraduate dissertation that focuses on any aspect of the geography of mobility and transport, undertaken at a UK university, and which demonstrates conceptual and/or methodological sophistication.

The prizewinning student in 2014 was Joshua Holmes for his dissertation Flying in the Face of Convention: Exploring the Spatial Politics of Affect and Biopower within Dublin Airport. The judges praised the original approach taken to understanding the human response to travelling through an airport and in particular the  innovative methodologies deployed which took advantage of new technologies. The analysis of the data provided a thorough understanding of the space of an airport terminal with strong reference made back to the literature. Details of the 2015 winner will be announced shortly.

Ashgate’s Transport and Mobility book series is run in conjunction with the Transport Geography Research Group.

Building the Modern Church

“… a powerful contribution to the field of architectural history and religious studies”
                                                                                                                                                Marginalia

Robert Proctor’s book on Roman Catholic Church architecture spanning a critical twenty year period from the mid-1950’s, has been enthusiastically received by architectural historians since its publication in April 2014. Proctor has been praised for the depth and thoroughness of his archival research…

“The book is clearly written, avoiding professional jargon (whether ecclesiastical or architectural), and is well illustrated with black and white and (fewer) colour plates. There is also a useful series of plans. This is an indispensable guide for all those interested in a hitherto little-regarded but extraordinarily rich subject”.
                                                                                                                                                  Context

To celebrate the book’s publication, the author took part in a tour organized by the Twentieth Century Society, which visited post-war Roman Catholic churches in West and North West London, all of which featured in the book. A copy of the tour notes is available to Click Here to download

Another important accolade for this book is news that it has been shortlisted for the prestigious Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion, more information about this award and the other shortlisted books can be found on the SAHGB website

Read all the excellent reviews and information on this book, including sample pages by visiting: Building the Modern Church: Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain, 1955 to 1975

Robert Proctor is Senior Lecturer on Architectural History & Theory at the University of Bath, UK.

British Generals in Blair’s Wars – a guest post from Hew Strachan

This is a guest post from Hew Strachan, editor (with Jonathan Bailey and Richard Iron) of British Generals in Blair’s Wars

**

In 2003–4 I was one of a group of five Oxford academics who set up the Changing Character of War Programme, thanks to a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. We were determined that this would be an opportunity not just to conduct academic study but also to engage with practitioners, and to that end we were extremely fortunate to engage Major General Jonathan Bailey. He had not only been the British Army’s last Director General of Development and Doctrine but also—very unusually for a British general—possessed a Ph. D. The book would not have come into being without the Programme, the Trust and the General.

Nobody then could foresee how the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan would dominate the next decade. Jonathan’s original focus lay on the Army’s most recent conflicts, those of the 1990s in the Gulf, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. They form the opening chapters of the book and for somebody like me—who had been brought up in the Cold War—they carried a great deal of intrinsic interest precisely because they dealt with real wars and not with conflict understood simply as theory. But the real excitement was to follow. Soon we were in a fortnightly cycle of seminars during the Oxford terms, at which officers who had recently returned from operations gave us their thoughts and reflections.

Following the campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan vicariously, albeit in the comfort of All Souls College, Oxford, gave me an insight into the conduct of war which I had never imagined that I—as an academic—would ever be privileged to acquire. Of course, I was not experiencing the intensity of fighting or even of service in a theatre of war. I was safe, warm and well fed. But I gained a perspective different from those who were in the field, precisely because my involvement was not broken by the rotations into and out of theatre but continued week by week. I developed a real sense of development over time—of the ways in which the character of war does indeed change as one side adapts to the enemy, to its political masters and its allies, and to the terrain and the seasons. I learnt that ‘the changing character of war’ was not just a convenient phrase, but a reflection of a core truth.

For a historian, there was a further privilege. This was the first cut at a narrative, revealing details and depths untouched by the press. Much is now in the public domain, not least as a result of the evidence taken by the Chilcot enquiry. But the discussions by Tim Cross of the arrangements (or lack of them) for the post-war occupation of Iraq or by Andrew Stewart of coalition politics in MND South East were then both new and jaw-dropping.

Jonathan Bailey had intended that he would edit the results into a book, but his other commitments precluded that. We were lucky that Richard Iron, himself a key figure in the British Army in Iraq as well as another very thoughtful and reflective soldier, came to Oxford on a Defence Fellowship and could begin to collate and coordinate what Jonathan had accumulated. Richard rendered what had been intended for oral delivery into prose for the page, without losing immediacy or suppressing difference. I had never imagined that, for all my role as the host at the original seminars, I would find myself figuring so prominently, both as contributor and as co-editor. It has been a privilege. It is also one which I hope will benefit the British Army as it digests the lessons of its recent conflicts, waged by an unusually intelligent and articulate group of officers.

**

About the author: Sir Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and was Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War from its inception in 2004 until 2012. He is the author of several highly acclaimed books on military history, including European Armies and the Conduct of War (1983), The Politics of the British Army (1997), and The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms (2001). He is a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the World War I Centenary Advisory Board. He has also written extensively on strategy, and is a member of the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel.