Professor Kirsteen McCue – PI (Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture & Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow)

Kirsteen McCue is PI of the RNSN. A graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, she worked for the Scottish Music Centre, the BBC and the Edinburgh International Festival, before becoming a member of the Scottish literature staff at the University of Glasgow in 2002. She has published widely on Romantic song culture and especially on Scottish song and has been Co-Investigator on two major AHRC grants: the ‘James Hogg Songs Project’ from 2005-2008 (http://www.jameshogg.stir.ac.uk) and ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21^st Century: Prose and Songs between 2011 and 2016 (http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/). She has edited two collections of songs by James Hogg for the Stirling South Carolina Research edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (EUP, 2014) and is currently completing an edition of Robert Burns’s songs for George Thomson for the new Oxford Collected Works of Robert Burns. She has recently co-edited (with Pam Perkins) Scottish Women’s Travel Writings (4 vols) for Routledge’s Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing Series (2016). She published an article on Byron’s National Songs for the Byron Journal in 2017 and her chapter ‘The Culture of Song’ is included in the new Oxford Handbook to British Romanticism (2018). Her chapter on John Clare’s songs for the drawing room is forthcoming in Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies.

 

Dr Sarah McCleave (Senior Lecturer in Music, Queen’s University, Belfast)

Sarah McCleave, a musicologist, is a senior lecturer in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a founding member of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s, and has been a co-editor of Theatre Notebook, for the Society for Theatre Research, since 2010. Her interest in romantic national song stems from her research on the Gibson-Massie Moore collection at Queen’s, including the Horizon 2020-funded project ERIN (Europe’s Reception of the Irish Melodies and National Airs: Thomas Moore in Europe), with digital outputs already available at http://omeka.qub.ac.uk and http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/erin. McCleave considers Moore’s working methods in her chapter, “The genesis of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies”, for Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century, a volume of essays published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

 

Dr Tríona O’Hanlon (Research Associate of the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland)

Tríona O’Hanlon, violinist and musicologist, is a Research Associate of the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland.  She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow in Music at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast from 2015 to 2017.  Tríona’s interest in Romantic National Song is evidenced by her research on the Horizon 2020 funded project ERIN (Europe’s Reception of the Irish Melodies and National Airs: Thomas Moore in Europe), which contributes to nineteenth-century musicological studies, Moore reception history and European cultural studies.  Her other research interests include the historiography of music in 18th- and 19th- century Dublin, source studies, performance practice and Handel scholarship.  She is RISM Ireland Editor and Editor of the SMI Theses Register.  Tríona’s awards and research fellowships include the Muriel McCarthy Research Fellowship (Marsh’s Library 2014), Royal Dublin Society Post-Doctoral Fellowship (Royal Dublin Society Library and Archives 2015), Charlemont Scholar (Royal Irish Academy 2016) and Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant (Keats-Shelly Association of America 2017).

 

Dr Elizabeth Edwards (Research Fellow, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies)

Elizabeth Edwards works on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature and culture, with a focus on textual editing, archipelagic critical approaches, and the history of women’s writing. Her publications include English-Language Poetry from Wales 1789-1806 (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Richard Llwyd: Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems (Trent Editions, 2016). She has a particular interest in Wales and national song, and published an account of the John Parry-Felicia Hemans collaboration, A Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822), in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2015.

 

Dr Mary-Ann Constantine (Reader and Project Leader, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth)

Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She works on the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany, and has a particular interest in song culture, travel writing and the cultural politics of the 1790s. With Dafydd Johnston she was general editor of the ten-volume series Wales and the French Revolution (2012-2015). Other publications include The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007) and (jointly edited with Nigel Leask) Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Scotland and Wales (2017). With Éva Guillorel, she recently published Miracles &Murders: An Introductory Anthology of Breton Ballads (Oxford, 2017). She is currently working on a book about the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820.

Dr Catherine Jones (Senior Lecturer in English and Coordinator of the Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Aberdeen)

Catherine Jones is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century literature and culture, with particular interests in the Scottish Enlightenment and its legacy, Walter Scott, Romanticism, the history of the Atlantic world, literature and the other arts, and medical humanities. Her most recent award-winning monograph is entitled Literature and Music in the Atlantic World 1767-1867 (2014). Previous books include a monograph on Walter Scott’s engagement with the medico-philosophical discourses of the Scottish Enlightenment, Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (2003); and the collection of essays, Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic, co-edited with David Duff (2007).

 

Professor Rachel Cowgill (Head of Music and Drama, School of Music, Humanities and Media, University of Huddersfield)

Rachel Cowgill  works in the area of cultural musicology, exploring the place, practice and meaning of music in its cultural, historical and political contexts. She has published widely on British music and musical life from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Her research has been funded by the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and she was a member of the Leverhulme International Research Network Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism and the Arts, c.1875–1960, led by Sarah V. Turner (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and University of York). Currently she is principal investigator for In Concert: Towards a Collaborative Digital Archive of Musical Ephemera, part of the AHRC’s Digital Transformations project, Transforming Musicology, led by Lancaster University. She has published widely on music and identity in Britain and is currently editing a collection of essays entitled Music and Ideas of North.

 

Dr Karen McAulay (Music and Academic Services Librarian, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow)

Karen McAulay is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), and graduated with a PhD in Music from the University of Glasgow in 2009.  Her book, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era, was published by Ashgate in 2013. Between 2012–2015, she was seconded as part-time post-doctoral researcher to the AHRC-funded Bass Culture project looking at accompaniments in Scottish fiddle music. Working with researchers at the University of Glasgow, Karen provided bibliographical, biographical and musicological input to the Historical Music of Scotland database, http://www.hms.scot/. Working at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, she currently shares her time 70:30 between the Whittaker Library and the Research Department, and is Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded networking project researching historical British legal deposit music collections (August 2017-August 2018).

Dr Oskar Cox Jensen (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London)

Oskar Cox Jensen is Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of History, Queen Mary University of London, where he is working on a book called When London Cried. His first book was Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822 (2015); his second, forthcoming, is The London Ballad-Singer. With David Kennerley and Ian Newman he is co-editor of Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (2018); he and Kennerley are also working on a new collection, Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780–1850. From 2013–17 he was a researcher at King’s College London on the ERC-funded project Music in London, 1800–1851. Oskar has authored numerous articles and book chapters besides two works of fiction and far too many amateur songs, and has performed Romantic-era songs as part of a number of public lectures; he is also historical advisor for a 2018 ITV/Amazon production of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

 

Professor Derek B. Scott

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and former Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. His research field is music, cultural history, and ideology, and he is a leading scholar in the field of popular music in 19th-century Britain. His books include The Singing Bourgeois (1989, R/2001), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). He has published numerous articles, and among his edited books is The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009). As the General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series from 2000 to 2016, he oversaw the publication of more than 140 books. In addition to his involvement with the Romantic National Song Network, he is currently funded by a five-year European Research Council advanced grant for a project focusing on the reception in London and New York of operettas from the German stage, 1907–1938.

 

Dr Rupert Ridgewell (Curator, Music Collections The British Library) 

Rupert Ridgewell is Curator of Printed Music at The British Library, where he is responsible for a collection consisting of some 1.6 million items covering the period from 1501 to the present day.  His research interests encompass music bibliography, the music publishing trade in Vienna and London around the turn of the nineteenth century, Mozart biography, and music-making by German internees in WW1. Publications include articles in Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Fontes artis musicae, as well as book chapters in The Land of Opportunity: Joseph Haydn and Britain (British Library, 2013), Mozart Studies 2 (CUP, 2015), and Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830 (University of Rochester Press, 2017).  In 2010 he was the recipient of the Richard S. Hill Award by the Music Library Association, for a book chapter in Music and the Book Trade (Oak Knoll Press, 2008).

Rupert has co-curated several exhibitions at the British Library, notably Poetry in Sound: the Music of Benjamin Britten (2013) and Wagner in London (2007). He is also editor of the Concert Programmes Database (www.concertprogrammes.org.uk), which is the main output of an AHRC-funded project he managed on secondment at the Royal College of Music (2004-2007) in collaboration with libraries and archives throughout the UK and Ireland.  He was appointed as an Honorary Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University in 2006 and elected as a Vice President of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) in 2016.

Link to academia.edu page: https://bl.academia.edu/RupertRidgewell
Link to BL researchers page: https://www.bl.uk/people/experts/rupert-ridgewell

 

Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (Research Assistant, University of Glasgow)

Brianna Robertson-Kirkland is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is a Research Assistant for the Romantic National Song Network and Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network. In 2017, she was the University of Glasgow Ross Fund fellow and travelled to Sydney, Australia to examine the early19th-century Scottish song collections held at Sydney Living Museums. She was also the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Chawton House Library Visiting Fellowship in 2017 where she interrogated literary accounts of domestic music lessons described in early 19th-century novels. Her interest in Romantic National Song centres on their use on the theatrical stage and in domestic performances.

 

Featured image: Featured image: Joseph Ritson; A select collection of English songs, with their original airs: and a historical essay on the origin and progress of national song; London; 1813: 156. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.