From Ship to Screen: Awarded the RMA 150th Anniversary Fellowship

I am delighted to share that, following the announcement at the Royal Musical Association’s Annual Conference this week, I have been awarded one of the Association’s 150th Anniversary Fellowships. This award provides crucial support for the completion of my first monograph, From Ship to Screen: The Cultural Legacy of Sea Shanties, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2026.

The project offers the first comprehensive cultural history of sea shanties, tracing their development from functional maritime work songs to contemporary digital phenomena. Originating aboard nineteenth-century sailing vessels as part of rhythmic labour, shanties were later reframed within the mid-twentieth-century folk revival and, most recently, revitalised in the digital sphere during the 2020 “Year of the Shanty” and the viral #ShantyTok trend. By situating these songs across historical, ethnographic and digital contexts, the book investigates how shanties have been continually reinterpreted as heritage, nostalgia and collective expression.

The fellowship enables me to undertake essential research during the final phase of the project, including ethnographic fieldwork at maritime festivals and interviews with contemporary performers in the UK, USA and Australia. These perspectives are vital for understanding how current practitioners negotiate the colonial, racialised and gendered legacies embedded in the repertoire, and how the genre adapts to new audiences and performance spaces.

Beyond contributing to scholarship in musicology, ethnomusicology and cultural history, the project speaks to a broader public fascination with maritime heritage and participatory music-making. It bridges academic study with community practice, connecting historical collections with living traditions, and highlighting the politics of performance and preservation in the twenty-first century.

I am deeply grateful to the RMA for recognising the significance of this work and for supporting early career researchers at a formative stage in their careers.