Patricia has never lost sight of her family. After teaching at Yale and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she settled with her husband in Santa Barbara, California, and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Becoming a mother deepened her love of storytelling and the natural world, and she began a tradition of spending summers with her daughter at Bass Lake in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains—championing adventures that echoed her own childhood experiences in Canada’s cottage country.
About the Author
In addition to being an animal lover, Patricia Fumerton is a Distinguished Professor of English emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She grew up in a large family in Eastern Canada and spent her summers at a rented cottage near Pinery Pointe on Georgian Bay. The first in her family to attend college, she studied at the University of Toronto and went on to earn a PhD at Stanford University, specializing in Renaissance Literature and Culture.
Patricia’s latest book, The Broadside Ballad in England. Moving Media and Tactical Publics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), a multimedia volume with accompanying website, which has recently been reissued in paperback, has been nominated for Boxalls 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die: The 2026 Year of Impact. And for her entire career of outstanding work, especially her over twenty years devoted to mounting online 9,000 high-resolution of broadside ballads, which include search engines for images and tunes, sung on a separate website, titled the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), ebba.english.ucsb.edu, she has won the 2026 Global Recognition Award.
Awarded 2026
