PhD, London (2010)

Una McIlvenna is Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2023-2027 and Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her research interests lie in the fields of early modern cultural and literary history. She is particularly interested in 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. The project will unearth, study, and record songs in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian from the mid-16th through the early 20th century. 

Una has a PhD in Renaissance Studies from Queen Mary University of London, and has taught at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne in Australia and the University of Kent and at Queen Mary in the UK. She has held visiting fellowships at the Newberry Library, Chicago and the Marsh Library, Dublin.

Her most recent book, Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900, looks at the fascinating and long-lived tradition of execution ballads. These songs told the news of crime and their usually ghastly punishments in sensationalist and graphic terms. The book won the 2023 Katharine Briggs Award from the Folklore Society and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's General History Prize. It is accompanied by her digital platform, Execution Ballads.

This interest in crime and punishment has led to other digital projects:

Against Erasure : virtual 3D reconstruction of the now demolished Manus Island Detention Centre, site of imprisonment and torture of refugees under Australian Government immigration policy

Newgate: online encyclopedia entry in the Map of Early Modern London about Newgate Gaol, written in collaboration with students from University of Melbourne HIST30073 2018

Her first book, Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores the real-life scandals that rocked the court of Catherine de Medici, the queen mother of France during the Wars of Religion. It debunks the myth of Catherine's 'flying squadron', and shows how women have been collectively slandered for centuries.

Graduate supervision:

• 2022, PhD, Nat Cutter, University of Melbourne, ‘Barbarian Civility: British Expatriates and the Transformation of the Maghreb in English Thought, 1660-1714'. Nat is currently Mary Lugton Fellow at the University of Melbourne: https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/813865-nat-cutter
• 2022, PhD, Elizabeth Tunstall, University of Melbourne, ‘The Elizabethan Succession Question and Competing Understandings of Monarchy, 1558-1603', now published as The Succession Debate and Contested Authority in Elizabethan England, 1558-1603 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
• 2020, MRes, Jen McFarland, University of Melbourne, ‘Pizzochere and Public Presence in Late Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice’. Jen is now a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/jennifer-mcfarland
• 2019, PhD, Jean McBain, University of Melbourne, ‘Liberty, Licentiousness and Libel: The London Newspaper, 1695–1742’
• 2017, PhD, Matthew Bach, University of Melbourne, ‘Combating Recidivist Crime in London: the Origins and Effectiveness of Legislation against Habitual Criminals, 1869 to 1895’, now published as Combating London’s Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869-95 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
• 2017, MRes, John McCloy, University of Kent, 'Late medieval and Renaissance Italian Fencing Manuals'
• 2016, MRes, Sophie Williams, University of Kent, 'The Relationship between the Mind and the Body in Early Modern England, Using Evidence from the Plays of William Shakespeare'