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York graduate wins prestigious Wolfson postgraduate studentship

Posted on 30 January 2024

Livvy Golby Kirk, who did the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies MA in 2020/21 has just won a prestigious Wolfson postgraduate studentship to study with Karen Harvey at Birmingham.

Livvy's dissertation will be a development of the MA one, for which she won the prize of the best dissertation of her year. In her words:

"For my PhD, I will be investigating the aural, visual, performative and textual constructions of masculinity in ballads, 1600 to 1750. I am particularly interested in exploring the role of ballads within the wider cultural experience of male identities, as well as evaluating continuity and change between seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This project was born out of my MA dissertation entitled Youthful Masculinity in Seventeenth-Century Ballads, where I noticed that the dialogic nature of ballads reveals negotiations around masculinity particularly clearly. My cross-disciplinary method for my PhD project draws directly from my experience as a CREMs student, which gave me the training and knowledge needed to approach ballads as a multimedia source."