The University has received £1million from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to produce the first complete scholarly edition of the works of Robert Burns, it has been announced.

The AHRC award, granted to the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, will see the publication of six volumes over the next eight years including The Oxford Handbook to Robert Burns and The Collected Prose of Robert Burns, with another six to follow in the next decade.

The project, entitled Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century, will involve a team of five literary scholars at Glasgow led by Dr Gerry Carruthers, a leading international Burns expert.
 
The team comprises Regius and Bradley Professors of English Literature Nigel Leask and Murray Pittock, Professor Jeremy Smith, and Burns song scholar and senior lecturer Dr Kirsteen McCue.

The Centre for Robert Burns Studies is the only one of its kind in the world.
 
The ARHC award signifies a change in attitude towards Burns among the scholarly community. According to academics, Burns Studies is now “a growing area of study after years of neglect”.
 
Dr Carruthers, who will edit The Oxford Handbook to Robert Burns, a collection of 35 critical and scholarly essays arising in part from the findings of the edition, said: “The AHRC funding along with the OUP contract marks a seismic shift in Burns Studies. 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.”
 
The award follows the Oxford University Press contract secured by the University in 2009 to produce the work.
 
The Glasgow-OUP edition will feature the Bard’s prose works, his letters, poems, songs and other miscellaneous writing.
 
An online exhibition space will also be created as part of the project, where members of the public and researchers can discuss various aspects of the research as well as share newly discovered materials.
 
Two new editions of Burns’ prose works and his songs for James Johnson’s entitled The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s Original Scottish Airs will be published.
 
Leading this work will be Dr McCue and Prof Pittock, Head of the College of Arts.
 
Dr McCue said: “Presenting Burns's songs as they appeared in the Scots Musical Museum and then in Thomson's Original Scottish Airs is unique in that our edition will bring together Burns's lyrics and full original musical sources for the first time.
 
“This contextualisation is crucial to our understanding, not just of Burns's lyrical prowess but his major work as a collector and amender of traditional songs.”
 
Alongside these editions, newly commissioned performances will be made produced and uploaded online to support the edition aurally.
 
Prof Leask will develop the Prose edition, The Collected Prose of Robert Burns. It is hoped that the first volume will be ready for publishing in Autumn 2012.
 
“This volume gathers together Burns’s Commonplace Books, tour journals, prefaces, public correspondences and other short prose works for the first time in a fully edited collection. They offer a crucial insight into his meteoric poetic development as well as illuminating his social and cultural context in 18th century Scotland,” said Prof Leask.
 
He added: “The Commonplace Books are a collection of three manuscript volumes which contain notes and observations from his reading and early drafts of his poems and songs. They are basically the laboratory from where his poetry emerged. They show his creative process at work.”
 
Part of the AHRC money will fund two Post Doc researchers as well as support two, three year PhD students.
 
The award will support a number of public events hosted by the Centre for Robert Burns Studies over the next five years.

Notes to Editors;
 
For more information on the Centre for Robert Burns Studies please see: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/robertburnsstudies/publications
 
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) supports research that furthers public understanding of human culture and creativity. For more information please see: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk
 
For more media information please contact Eleanor Cowie, Media Relations Officer at the University of Glasgow, on 0141 330 3683 or eleanor.cowie@glasgow.ac.uk

First published: 21 February 2011

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