Updates & Events 2010-2011

As you can see elsewhere on the website here, we had a very busy and rewarding 2009. We hosted our hugely successful Robert Burns 1759-2009 conference in January - one of the first of the events to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns and Scotland's 'Year of Homecoming'. The University's international students also managed to break the world record of singing 'Auld Lang Syne' simulateously in some 41 languages on 30 November in our Bute Hall to mark the close of the 'Year of Homecoming' and you can see how they did this in You Tube. Many thanks indeed to Lesley Richmond at the Glasgow University Archives for masterminding this. We supplied her with as many translations as we were able to source! And there are plans to have another go at smashing the record in future, also commissioning several brand new translations of Burns's lyric in the process.
 
As a result of all this activity, we kept rather quiet in 2010! However, a number of exciting events took place in Winter 2010-2011. The Centre for Robert Burns Studies co-organised a conference on Byron and Burns in Manchester in December and hosted our own 1-day conference called 'Burns and Beyond' here at the University of Glasgow in January 2011. Then later in the Spring of 2011 our Glasgow-based Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded 'Robert Burns Beyond Text' project coordinated a fascinating conference called 'The Object of Poetry', held at the University of Dundee.

A number of publications associated with members of our Centre for Robert Burns Studies appeared in 2009-2010 and these are also listed on the website.
 
The Centre for Robert Burns Studies secured funding from the University's Chancellor's Fund to record James MacMillan's 'Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots' with the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt and singers Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall. This recording was made in Eisenstadt, Austria in January 2010. For more information about the piece and the team who gave the premiere, click here.

And finally, in January 2011 we received news of the major AHRC research grant awarded for our major research project, 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century', to produce the new Oxford University Press edition of the works of Robert Burns.