Lecture Una McIlvenna: Disaster Ballads in Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Europe

This year, Una McIlvenna (Australian National University) will give the Annual Lecture of the Utrecht University Centre for Early Modern Studies (UUCEMS). In her lecture, McIlvenna will discuss disaster ballads in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe.

Songs about disasters

From the dawn of the printing press, all across Europe, newsworthy events were put into verse and sung to the tune of familiar melodies. From crime and punishment to battles and sieges, and from political upheavals to natural disasters, ballads about all kinds of high-profile events were printed cheaply and hawked in the street by ballad-sellers, who sang the news in the song sheets and pamphlets that were full of highly sensationalist language. 

In her talk, McIlvenna will explore one of the major categories of news-songs from the early modern period through the nineteenth century: disasters. She will look at songs about earthquakes, fires, floods, shipwrecks, and other disasters in English, Dutch, Italian, German and French, to ask a range of questions about how these songs presented the news of mass death and frightening destruction.

How did ballads present the news compared with prose accounts of the same events? How did the conjunction of text and melody manipulate the emotions of listener-singers? Did disaster ballads present the news differently compared with ballads about other kinds of news events? How does the singing of the news about tragic events change over time as we approach the nineteenth century? 

While disasters such as floods, earthquakes, fires, and storms are perennial but more prevalent in specific regions, there are certain disasters, such as plague, that fade away with the approach of the modern era. The rise of industrialisation, however, brings a whole new range of ways for workers to die in horrible ways, while mass transportation notably increases death tolls. 

About Una McIlvenna

Una McIlvenna is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2023-2027 and Associate Professor at the Australian National University. She is particularly well known for her work on the singing of news in early modern Europe. In May 2026, Una McIlvenna is a Descartes Senior Fellow. 

The lecture is co-organised by the UUCEMS and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. There will be drinks after the lecture.