Lucie Duggan

Trinity College Dublin, B.A. Hons. TSM Moderatorship in History of Art & Architecture and French 2008-2012

University of Copenhagen, M.A. in English Studies 2013-2015

University of Southern Denmark, PhD candidate 2016-Present

The ballad collection of Francis James Child — published in the second half of the nineteenth century as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads — has had a major and lasting influence on the study of ballads. 

My study of the Child collection considers the literary historical factors that influenced its production. I trace the emergence of certain key thoughts in the history of ballad scholarship, examining how notions of medium and gender were embedded in scholarly practises of ballad collecting and editing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, I propose that a new approach to Child’s definitive collection — using the quantitative methods of the recent digital turn in the humanities — offers new ways of understanding the makeup of the corpus.

As part of my doctoral project, I have constructed a digital dataset of the Child corpus, which includes 305 individual ballads and their multiple versions, totalling just over a thousand ballads. I examine the collection quantitatively in an attempt to determine whether a computational approach to literary texts can provide new insights into questions that have long vexed the study of ballads: What is the difference between a broadside ballad and a traditional ballad? How do the repertoires of men and women differ, if at all?

Ballads; history of gender and sexuality; early modern print culture; digital humanities