Research

The Centre for Robert Burns Studies: Shedding light on Robert Burns

Issued: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 12:09:00 BST

Burns stained glass windowEstablished in 2007, the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow is the only one of its kind in the world. The centre’s mission is the development of research, scholarship and teaching in the literature, life and cultural period of Robert Burns: Scotland’s national poet. Burns was born in 1759 and rose to literary prominence in 1786 with the first collection of his poetry.

With a recent award of £1.1m from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), academics in the centre are pooling their expertise to produce the first complete scholarly edition of the works of Scotland’s much-loved poet. The five-year project, Editing Burns for the 21st Century, follows the Oxford University Press (OUP) contract secured by the centre in 2009 to publish the collection, which will include Burns’s prose works, letters, poetry, songs and other miscellaneous writing.

By incorporating journals that Burns wrote in the 1780s – commonplace books containing notes and drafts of poems, and letters to the press, friends and colleagues – the edition is set to elevate Burns’s reputation within the world of academia, explains Professor Gerry Carruthers, director of the centre and editor of the Oxford Handbook to Robert Burns.

‘The AHRC funding along with the OUP contract marks a seismic shift in Burns studies,’ he says. ‘We now have the platform to assert Burns’s status as a major Romantic Period artist alongside the likes of William Wordsworth and John Keats.’ Dr Kirsteen McCue is co-director of the centre and will edit a new edition of Burns Songs for George Thomson as part of the collection. She too is of the opinion that the project is highly significant.

‘A lot of new material associated with Burns has been discovered, which has not been addressed by previous scholarship,’ she says. ‘It’s spread far and wide across the globe, and now we have an opportunity to pull it all together so that everybody can see the complete output.’

Two PhD studentships have been assigned to the project and the centre is keen to develop more opportunities for postgraduates in the future. For Dr McCue, having a dedicated Robert Burns research community at the University means students have access to the material and experts needed to produce excellent research.

‘We’ve got very close connections with the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library and the new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, all of which have amazing collections of material, and we would definitely have these open to anybody who’s interested in working on Burns,’ she says. ‘What’s more, the centre is part of a broader interest in the Long 18th Century and Romanticism. So if a student is interested in working on a contemporary of Burns or comparing Burns with a writer from a different century, for example, we have experts in Scottish and English literature who can cosupervise projects of that nature.’

Related pages

<< Groups