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Staff Profile

Dr Hannah Scott

NUAcT Fellow: Arts and Humanities

Background

I joined the School of Modern Languages in January 2022 as an Academic Track (NUAcT) fellow. My current project explores the role of popular music in communicating and responding to experiences of disease, medicine, and public health in the era of Parisian café-concert and London music hall. I can also be found down research rabbit holes about the nineteenth-century yodeling craze, nonsense songs, and what makes funny songs funny.


More broadly, my research interests embrace music, performance, and popular culture, especially in nineteenth-century France. My latest monograph, Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow 1870-1904 (Routledge, 2022), examines the role of low-brow music in forming an idea of ‘Britishness’ for the French at the height of cross-channel rivalry - scores of the fascinating songs at the heart of this research can be found on the project website here: https://singingtheenglishuk.wordpress.com/ My research is informed by my background as a keen flautist, and I occasionally dally with singing and dancing some of my research material in public.


I currently chair the Music, Medicine, & History Network - https://musicmedicinehistory.org/ - and organize its Wednesday Seminar Series. I have recently taken up a role on the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies advisory board, and am Recordings Editor for Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research (the Journal of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association).


Previous publications include a monograph at the intersection of material culture and literature in Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, Broken Glass, Broken World (Legenda, 2016) and numerous articles ranging across popular song, material culture, and literary studies - see 'Publications' below. I received my PhD in French from the University of Bristol in 2014 and have since held teaching positions and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, and Nottingham.


I am also active in advocating for better working conditions for early-career academics. In 2020, I founded the UCML Early-Career Academic Support Network, to connect early-career colleagues in need of mentoring but without support in their current role with more experienced academic from across the field (https://university-council-modern-languages.org/early-career-academics/eca-support-network/). I recently co-edited a special number of Nottingham French Studies with Dr James Illingworth (Cardiff) to foreground the impacts of precarity upon research methodologies in French studies (January 2024).



Research

Key Research Interests

~ Nineteenth-Century French performance culture, especially popular music, dance, variety theatre, & street spectacle

~ Cultural history of urban public health and Parisian city life

~ Material culture, especially domestic objects, ephemera, and clothing


Current Project: Maladies and Music - Dealing with Disease in Popular Song

My current project explores the role of music as a tool for communicating and responding to experiences of disease, public health, and medicine.

As Paris urbanized in the nineteenth century, the lives of many inhabitants were profoundly marked by inadequate sanitation and rampant disease. Yet as the century progressed, rapid scientific developments also marked a new era of health science – and this evolution inspired over two hundred popular songs about public health and medical care. My research will use this vast body of previously unexamined songs as a springboard to conduct a project in two key phases.

The first phase examines the popular music from this crossroads in Parisian public health, making a significant contribution to medical humanities by drawing together French cultural studies, musicology, and music history. This questions, first, how the French populace used song to respond to, play with, and understand these transformations, conducting analyses of songs about epidemics, medical practitioners, and scientific advances. Secondly, it scrutinizes how songs variously supported or conflicted with scientific expertise and advice. Thirdly, it asks why song was such a compelling medium through which to explore such radical shifts in understanding and experience.

The second phase of this project will examine the influence of music-hall traditions and popular song in the realm of public health since the nineteenth century in France, the UK, and the USA. 


Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from potential research candidates with interests in long nineteenth-century France (approx. 1789-1914), particularly focusing on popular music, performance, dance, and culture; literary studies, especially with a cultural-historical angle; or comparative studies across British and French cultures of the same period.


Public engagement

• Supporting Tyne Theatre and Opera House during its lottery-funded redevelopment as part of a team of theatre history specialists (Jan 2022 to present)

• Music consultant for the Song Easel charity’s ‘Potpourri’ Schools’ Project in South-East London (summer 2022) see the mini-documentary, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b5YXnkX35s)

• Guest speaker on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking ‘France, Music Hall and History’ (July 2022)

• Selected participant for the New Generation Thinkers Workshops (2020)

• Event organizer and performer at the Being Human Humanities Festival: ‘Singing les Roastbeef!: Comic Englishmen at the French Music Hall’ (November 2018)


Recent conference papers and talks

• 'Comic song in the long nineteenth-century: what’s so funny?', lecture recital with Oskar Cox Jensen, forthcoming at the INCSA conference, July 2024

• 'Yo-de-le-hi-hu! The Yodelling pop stars of nineteenth-century Paris', research seminar for ICMuS Newcastle, forthcoming May 2024.

• ‘Smallpox songs: vaxers and anti-vaxers at the café-concert’, performance paper, at the Society for French Studies annual conference, June 2023.

• ‘Chez M. Pasteur: vaccination and popular song in the fin de siècle’, at the France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789-1918 research network Cambridge, March 2023.

• ‘Yvette Guilbert, chanteuse fin-de-siècle’, Nineteenth-Century Song Club, University of Notre-Dame London Campus, October 2022.

• ‘Song, sickness, scepticism: popular music and public health in the Third Republic’, at the ASMCF annual conference, September 2022.

• ‘Singing the English: comic popular songs in the French Belle Epoque’, at the Society of Musicology Ireland annual conference, June 2022.

• ‘Songs in the Laundry: musical meaning in Zola’s L’Assommoir’, at the ‘Song in the Novel’ British Academy conference, September 2021.

• Keynote:‘In Praise of Hoarding: Cultural History and the Archival Labyrinth’, Society of Dix-Neuvièmistes Archives Study Day, June 2021.

• ‘French Citizens from British folk: adopting Scottish and Irish folk music in the Third Republic’, forthcoming ‘Seizing Sound and Sounding French’ seminar, University of Helsinki’, June 2021.

• ‘Cancan not Canon: Teaching Popular Performance Culture’, Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Teaching with/beyond the Canon, April 2021.

• ‘The Singing Linguist: Discovering English through Popular Song in Fin-de-Siècle France’, at the NCSA conference, University of California [online], March 2021.

• ‘The Rebellious Laundress: Washerwomen snubbing the patriarchy at the café-concert’, at the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes conference, St. Andrews [online], March 2021.

• ‘Ça te chante d’apprendre une langue? Language Learning, Song, and the Third Republic’, at the ASMCF conference, Paris, September 2019.

• ‘Angleterre spectaculaire! England as Spectacle at the Belle Époque Music Hall’, at the Theatre and Visuality in the Nineteenth Century symposium, Warwick, June 2019.

• ‘Jig-a-jig-ah: London and Music in French Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing’, at the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes conference, Southampton, April 2019.

• ‘Psalm Screamers and Braying Brass: Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century France’, at the Symposium of Sound, Durham, September 2018.

Teaching

In the 2023-24 academic year, I will be teaching:


FRE2009: Aspects of History and Culture, 'Revolution' section (Seminar 1).


SML4099: I am available to supervise dissertations, particularly on topics relating to nineteenth-century French literature, art, material culture, and popular culture (especially song, dance and festivals).

Publications