Madeline Sargeant is a PhD candidate in English at the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the Australian National University. In 2025, she was awarded a doctoral position on Dr Una McIlvenna’s ARC-funded Future Fellowship project, Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia, 1550–1920. The title of her thesis is ‘The History of Ballads as News Media in Australia’.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History (Hons) from The University of Melbourne where she wrote her Honours thesis ‘Blood Miracles and the 1641 Rebellion’. Her research interests include settler, diasporic and Colonial histories; religion and religious conflict; supernatural belief; and wonders and print culture from the early modern period until the early twentieth century in Australia and Europe.