Kirsteen McCue MA, DPhil

• Senior Lecturer
• 18th & Early 19th Century Scottish Literature
• Scottish Literature and its connections with Scottish music
• Scottish song of all periods
• Robert Burns
• James Hogg
• Women writers in 18th and 19th centuries and beyond
• Lyrical poetry in the 20th Century Scottish Renaissance
• Scottish Children’s writers and illustrators

• Associate Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies
• Graduate Convener
• Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Adviser
• Member of Faculty Higher Degrees Committee
• Member of Arts and Humanities Graduate School Board
• SESLL Research Committee member
• Departmental Deputy Fire Officer
  
  Room 403, 7 University Gardens
  telephone: 0141 330 8442
  e-mail: K.McCue@scotlit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Publications

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Biography

Kirsteen McCue was born near Glasgow and completed her Master of Arts in Music and Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow in 1989, winning both the prestigious Herkless Prize for top woman graduate in the Arts Faculty and also the Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. Her studies in Oxford resulted in a D.Phil thesis on the song editor George Thomson (1757-1851) and his collections of National Airs, a project which involved his collaborating with some of the most famous writers and musicians of the day, notably Robert Burns and Joseph Haydn. In 1993 she spent a post-doctoral year working closely with the great Burns scholar the late Professor Donald A. Low at the Centre for Scottish Literature and Culture at the University of Stirling, where she focussed specifically on Scottish women song writers of the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries.

From 1994 until 1998 Kirsteen was General Manager of the Scottish Music Information Centre, a unique archive of music by Scottish composers of all periods, and an organisation at the forefront of international promotion of Scottish music (now The Scottish Music Centre: www.scottishmusiccentre.com). Between 1998 and 2002 she worked as a freelance writer and broadcaster for the BBC in Scotland, presenting (and sometimes producing) a wide variety of music programmes for both BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio Scotland. During this time she also worked regularly for the Edinburgh International Festival, writing and presenting a number of lecture series for their continuing education programme. In 2000 she was invited to be a co-director of the Festival’s award-winning and highly successful ‘Work, Sex and Drink’ concert series which focussed on Scottish song. In 2002 the Festival invited her to commission and edit all the EIF music programmes.

Since 2002 Kirsteen has been at the University of Glasgow’s Department of Scottish Literature where she teaches across all undergraduate courses. She is currently supervising PhD theses on William Soutar, James Hogg, and George Mackay Brown, while supervising masters theses on Scottish Victorian popular Children’s literature and the work of 19th century poet Janet Hamilton. She is currently the graduate convener in the Department of Scottish Literature and since 2006-7 she has been a post-graduate adviser for the Faculty of Arts.

Kirsteen McCue’s research work continues to focus closely on George Thomson, and the work of key Scottish song writers and editors of the 18 th and early 19 th centuries. She has been actively involved in a Glasgow University project, directed by Professor Marjory Rycroft, to edit all of the folksong settings of Joseph Haydn for Thomson’s collections. These have now been published in two volumes of the Haydn Gesamtausgabe and have been recorded for general release by the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt and singers Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall (see: http://www.haydntrioeisenstadt.at/schotten/schottenindex.htm).

At the moment research is focussing closely on James Hogg’s songs, as Kirsteen is editing, with Janette Currie, James Hogg’s final volume of songs, Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd (1831), and an additional volume of miscellaneous songs for the acclaimed Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg. In 2005 this project was awarded a major research grant of just over £150,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding is allowing key research into both the literary and musical contexts of the songs, and the final volumes will present the songs in a new way for most literary editions, also encouraging performance of the songs themselves. As part of this project she is working closely with her principal co-investigator, Professor Emeritus Douglas Mack and the research assistant on the project, Dr Janette Currie, both of whom are at the University of Stirling. And further information about past and ongoing work can now be found at a newly developed website: http://www.jameshogg.stir.ac.uk

Kirsteen has been active in 2009 as part of the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, performing and lecturing across Scotland, Europe and North America. She is Associate Director of the new Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and played a central role in coordinating in its three-day international conference in January 2009 (see: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/robertburnsstudies/). She is a member of the key editorial team for the new Oxford University Press edition of the Collected Works of Robert Burns, based at the Centre here at Glasgow, for which she will edit Burns’s songs for Thomson.

September 2009

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