University news

Leading experts in Scotland’s best loved poet, Robert Burns, have signed a contract with the Oxford University Press to produce the largest and most comprehensive collection of his works.

The extensive 15 year project will be undertaken by the new Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Bringing together world leaders in the field of Burns studies, the multi-volume edition of the Collected Works of Robert Burns will be edited by Director of the new Centre, Dr Gerard Carruthers.

He said: “This is a great coup for the Centre for Robert Burns Studies and for the University of Glasgow. This is a particularly opportune moment for such a venture here at Glasgow as we have an outstanding group of scholars who have both the academic credentials required for such an edition, and the imagination and passion for Burns to produce something truly spectacular, which will be a lasting monument in textual and cultural scholarship.”

Literature Editor at the Oxford University Press, Andrew McNeillie, said: “The new Oxford Robert Burns under Gerard Carruthers' General Editorship is a major landmark in prospect. It will establish Burns for the 21st-century and illuminate corners of his life and work, and their afterlives, never brought to light before.  The edition will replace James Kinsley's edition of the poems and songs, published by Oxford in 1968, radically improving on that thorough and well-researched work in key ways, but especially in representing and attending to the songs and the tunes to which they were variously set. I look forward to nothing more than having it on my shelf.”

The project will begin in 2009 which is the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth. The edition will be supported by an international team of editorial advisers, including, Professor Jerome McGann, one of the most senior American scholars of Romanticism, Professor Stephen Gill of the University of Oxford and general editor of the Collected Works of Wordsworth, and Professor G Ross Roy of the University of South Carolina and doyen of American Burns Scholars.

A formal launch will take place during the Centre’s major international conference in January, celebrating all aspects of Burns and his work. More information about the conference that runs from 15 – 17 January 2009 can be found at www.glasgow.ac.uk/robertburnsstudies

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Notes to editors

For more information please contact Kate Richardson in the University of Glasgow Media Relations Office on 0141 330 3683 or email K.Richarsdon@admin.gla.ac.uk

First published: 31 July 2008