POSTPONED: PRIVACY LECTURE: ‘Piercing the Private Sphere through Song’

Lecture by Dr Angela McShane

Dr Angela McShane is Head of Research Development, at Wellcome Collection and is Associate Fellow in History at the University of Warwick. 

Angela McShane is a social and cultural historian, specialising in the study of everyday material culture, popular print, and the social and cultural role of intoxicants across the early modern Atlantic world. Among other things, she has published widely on the subject of 17^th century political broadside ballads, including a reference work, Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth Century England: A Critical Bibliography (2011), book chapters, and journal articles in Past and Present, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Early Modern History, Popular Music Journal and Media History. A monograph, The Political World of the Broadside Ballad in Seventeenth-Century England, is forthcoming. She is also the Co-Investigator for an AHRC funded bibliographical and recording web-database project: Hit Songs and their Significance in 17^th Century England, which will be freely available online in 2020. 

Her first talk: Piercing the private sphere through song will consider not only how songs could be used deliberately to break in and disrupt private space, but also how song writers used ideas of privacy, not least as a political tool.

From 2006-2017 McShane was Head of the V&A/RCA Postgraduate programme in History of Design and Material Culture based in the Research Department of the V&A, where she also consulted on and contributed to numerous exhibitions and publication projects, including Quilts and the V&A’s permanent European Galleries 1600-1815. In Autumn 2017, McShane took up a post as Head of a new Research Development team at Wellcome Collection, developing an exciting and innovative research development strategy and programme.

McShane’s second talk - A Curtain Lecture: Investigating Health and Materiality through Wellcome’s Collections – will literally be using the curtain as a way of negotiating a path through Wellcome’s huge, rich, and immensely varied collections. it will investigate what our collections reveal about the social and material agency of the curtain and focus on why understanding the ‘social communication network’ surrounding curtains, especially in health contexts, might matter to past and present ideas of privacy and power.

Read more about Dr Angela McShane here.

The event is open to all. No registration required.