Centre for Robert Burns Studies Full Team January 2024. Credit Martin Shiels

Associated Staff

Who we are

  • Director: Professor Pauline Mackay

Email:  Pauline.Mackay@glasgow.ac.uk

See Professor Mackay's full profile page  

Pauline Mackay is Professor of Robert Burns Studies and Cultural Heritage. She is the Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, having previously served as Associate Director. She is Co-I and Co-Editor on the major AHRC-funded project, 'Editing Robert Burns's Poetry and Correspondence'. In addition to her ongoing work as part of the 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century' project team, Pauline is currently writing a monograph about the bawdy song and verse of Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) and her most recent book publication is Burns for Every Day of the Year (Black & White Publishing, 2021; 2025). Pauline’s interdisciplinary research and teaching incorporates expertise in Scottish Literature, Cultural Memory, Material Culture, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and Immersive Technologies. Since 2021 she has worked with immersive learning platform Edify to develop the first ever Robert Burns VR (Virtual Reality) experience, 'Burns Beyond Reality'. In 2023 Pauline was awarded the English Association Fellows Award for her use of XR (Extended Reality) technology to explore and illuminate Robert Burns’s literary and cultural legacy, and in the same year she was named in the Saltire Society's '40 under 40' celebrating people from across Scotland's Creative Industries. Pauline now collaborates (as Co-Investigator) with colleagues from the University of Glasgow’s XR Project Board, together with industry and Cultural Heritage partners, on the £6.2m Levelling-Up Innovation Accelerator project to develop a Museums in the Metaverse platform (Innovate UK). Her most recent research on the Burns Supper, Intangible Cultural Heritage and Social XR aims to transform the ways in which ICH is shared, received and understood in the 21st century, by working at the intersection of living heritage and immersive realities. 

  • Associate Director: Dr Ronnie Young 

Email: Ronnie.Young@glasgow.ac.uk

See Dr Young's full profile page

Ronnie Young is a Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, specialising in the literature of the Enlightenment period. Publications include the co-edited volume The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture with Bucknell University Press (2016). Ronnie is currently co-editor of the correspondence of Robert Burns for the forthcoming editions of the poet’s letters with Oxford University Press as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence’ (PI Gerard Carruthers). Other Burns-related activities include the Burns Paper Database, an online research resource for analysing manuscripts in Burns’s hand, and the development of online and blended learning resources aimed at bringing recent scholarly work on Burns to a popular audience, including the Massive Open Online course ‘Robert Burns: Poems, Songs and Legacy’ for Futurelearn and the longer 10-week course ‘Robert Burns Online’. 

  • Professor Gerard Carruthers, Founding Director and Past Co-Director

Email:  Gerard.Carruthers@glasgow.ac.uk

See Professor Carruther's full profile page

Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Chair of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was the first Director and then Co-Director of the CRBS, which he founded in 2007. Gerry is General Editor of the Oxford University Press Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Burns and was Principal Investigator for two major Arts and Humanities Research Council awards, ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ (2011-16 & 2017-22), amounting to over £2 million in grant income. He was Principal Investigator for the Carnegie Trust major-grant funded project editing the letters of James Currie (2009-11, see online resource with Kenneth Simpson and Pauline Mackay); he served until 2022 as Convenor for the ‘Burns Scotland’ nationally-recognised collections partnership and is Honorary Advisor to the National Trust for Scotland on Burns. He is also Secretary and Board Member of Robert Burns Ellisland Museum & Farm Trust. He was Co-editor of the Burns Chronicle, 2020-22 and is Chair of that journal’s Advisory Board. He edited the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (2024) the biggest compendium of Burns criticism ever to be published. Currently, he is part of the editing team for the three volumes of Correspondence and he is editing Poetry (2 vols) for the OUP edition. At the moment he is also writing a new biography of Burns.  In 2021 he was made the first ever Honorary Fellow of the Robert Burns World Federation. He has lectured on Burns in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. He has appeared in news features and documentaries about Burns on BBC (UK national) news, BBC (Scotland) TV, BBC Scotland Radio, BBC World Service TV, Radio 2, Radio 4, Scottish Television and on programmes such as Newsnight, Millionaire Hoarders and David Wilson’s Crime Files (on forgery in Burns), as well as in numerous podcasts and online lectures. His Burns publications can be found at

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/gerardcarruthers/#publications

  • Professor Kirsteen McCue, Past Co-Director

Email:  Kirsteen.McCue@glasgow.ac.uk

See Professor McCue's full profile page

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow. She was made Associate Director of CRBS on its foundation in 2007 and then became it's co-Director until she stepped down in 2022. In 2011 she managed a Chancellor's fund project on 'Burns Choral Settings' with the University Chapel Choir. She has been Co-Investigator on the AHRC 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Prose and Songs' project, and is editor of volume 4: Robert Burns's Songs for George Thomson for the Oxford Works of Robert Burns which was published in Feburary 2021. She led on several of the accompanying digital outputs for this project, including 'Performing Burns's songs in his own day', and 'Burns and the Fiddle'. She also directed the first modern performance of Burns's cantata 'The Jolly Beggars' (1818) in Glasgow and at the British Library in London.  During her time with CRBS she has published widely on Scottish song culture, has produced a number of book chapters and articles on Burns's songs and musical settings and responses to Burns's work. She was Principal Investigator of the RSE-funded 'Romantic National Song Network' between 2017-2019, which explored British songs around the time of Burns. And she is now leading the RSE-funded network the 'Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT): Creating digital futures and networks' 2021-2023, which includes many appearances of Burns's work in numerous different languages. She holds honorary memberships of the Burns Club of London, and of the Burns Clubs of Greenock, Irvine, Mauchline and Allanton and was the first woman ever to attend and deliver the Immortal Memory at the Bachelor's Club in Tarbolton in 2014. 

  • Professor Rhona Brown, Past Co-Director

Email:  rhona.brown@glasgow.ac.uk

See Professor Brown's full profile page

Rhona Brown is Professor of Scottish Textual Cultures at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on eighteenth-century Scottish poets’ relationships with contemporary newspaper and magazine culture, and is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015). Rhona is a former Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies from 2022 -2023, having previously served as Associate Director. She is a former Convener of the Research Sub-Group of Burns Scotland (2015-20), a national consortium of repositories with Burns-related holdings. She is Co-Investigator on two major eighteenth-century editing projects which are funded by the AHRC: ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’ (PI Murray Pittock), in which she is editing Ramsay’s Poems and co-editing his Letters and Prose, and ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence’ (PI Gerard Carruthers), where she is co-editing Burns’s Letters. Rhona sits on the Advisory Board for the new Burns Chronicle, published by Edinburgh University Press, and is co-editor of the academic journal Scottish Literary Review.

  • Professor Murray Pittock, Principal Investigator

    Email: Murray.Pittock@glasgow.ac.uk

    See Professor Pittock's full profile page

    Murray Pittock is Pro Vice-Principal and Bradley Professor at the University of Glasgow and a member of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is Principal Investigator and General Editor of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay (AHRC, 2018-23 (LINK)) and was PI on Robert Burns and the Scottish Economy (Economic Development Directorate, Scottish Government, 2018-20 and on Robert Burns Beyond Text (AHRC, 2010-11)) and the Global Burns Network (AHRC, 2007-09). He was also Co-Investigator on Phase 1 of Editing Robert Burns for the 21st century and edited Volumes II and III, The Scots Musical Museum. In 2002, he gave the Chatterton Lecture to the British Academy on Burns, and his other main publications on the poet include Robert Burns in Global Culture (2011) and The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (2014). He has held visiting appointments at Yale, New York University, Notre Dame, Trinity College, Dublin, Charles University, Prague, South Carolina and other institutions, and has made around 2000 media appearances in 55 countries on culture, politics, history and society.

  • Professor Nigel Leask, Principal Investigator

    EMail: Nigel.Leask@glasgow.ac.uk

    See Professor Leask's full profile page

Nigel Leask is Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on British, and especially Scottish, romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on orientalism and empire, travel writing, Robert Burns, ‘improvement’, Ossian and the Gaelic world. His monograph Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-century Scotland (Oxford 2010) won the Saltire Prize for the best research monograph in 2010. He was a Co-Investigator on the AHRC 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Prose and Songs' project, and edited volume 1, Robert Burns’ Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford 2014). His is co-editing the correspondence of Robert Burns for the forthcoming editions of the poet’s letters with Oxford University Press, as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence’ (PI Gerard Carruthers). Between 2014 and 2018 he was Co-I of the AHRC funded ‘Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750-1820’, and is currently Co-I of ‘Curious Travellers: Digital Editions of Thomas Pennant's Tours of Scotland and Wales ‘, for which he is editing Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides 1772. Recent publications include Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour 1720-1820 (Oxford 2020) and Old Ways and New Roads: Travel and Tourism in Scotland, 1720-1830 (Birlinn 2021), co-edited with John Bonehill and Anne Dulau. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

  • Dr Craig Lamont, Principal Investigator and past Research Associate (AHRC Project: 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century'): 

Email: Craigronald.Lamont@glasgow.ac.uk

See Dr Craig Lamont's full profile page

Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies in the University of Glasgow, working across two major research centres: the Centre for Robert Burns Studies (CRBS) and the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies (CSCS). Craig’s PhD on The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow was awarded the Roy Medal for 2016, for the best thesis on Scottish Literature, and the resulting monograph was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. From 2016–2022 Craig was a lead Research Associate in CRBS, contracted on two AHRC-funded projects: ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ and ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’. Craig’s work on textual editing, book production, and cultural memory led to a plethora of publications across various disciplines. His pathbreaking bibliography on early Robert Burns editions (2016; 2017) was awarded a grant by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and is still used to this day in book sales to help identify key rare Burns editions. Craig also co-authored a book chapter, ‘Robert Burns: archival aspects of the printed and manuscript record in the digital age’, which explored methods of paper-making, print culture, palaeography, and mass spectrometry to validate and authenticate Burns materials. The chapter was published in Archival Materialities in a Digital Age eds. Andrew Prescott and Eirini Goudaroli, Proceedings of the British Academy (269) (OUP: 2025). Craig continues to work on editing the Correspondence of Robert Burns, and on cultural memory, print culture, and Glasgow in the British Empire.

 


Centre Administration

robertburnsstudies@glasgow.ac.uk

 

Honorary Fellows


Professor Patrick Scott

Professor Liam McIlvanney

Professor Martin Prochazka

Professor Fiona Stafford

 

Research Associates

Professor Sandro Jung
 

Past Members

The late Professor G. Ross Roy, University of South Carolina

The late Professor Kenneth Simpson

The late Professor R.D.S. Jack