In a strangely sychronistic way, the different topics I’ve focused on as a researcher are now intertwining and demanding to be considered alongside one another. My forthcoming engagements are a perfect example of this!
Next week I’m going to see the Copyright Collection at the University of Aberdeen. That’s directly related to the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network activities.
The following week I’m sharing a Pecha Kucha at Icepops 2019 (an ‘International Copyright-Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars’, in Edinburgh). In 20 slides each lasting 20 seconds, I’m combining historical research, intellectual property, and modern academic librarianship, in ‘Silence in the Library: from Copyright Collections to Cage’. 
And I’ll be playing the piano, purely in a background music capacity in the evening! Nothing scholarly about that part – I cannot call it practice-based research in the least.
July will see me speaking about paratext at the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies congress in Edinburgh (‘Reading Between the Lines: Paratext in National Song and Fiddle Tunebooks of the Georgian Era’), and also having some vacation!
By August, hopefully my next grant application will either be taking shape, or have been submitted. Exciting times.
September, talking about songs in the Napoleonic era at a conference held at King’s College London: the British Commission for Military History’s War and Peace in the Age of Napoleon conference. My talk is entitled, ‘Napoleon’s Songs: the Artistic Responses of Composers and Performers to Contemporary Current Affairs’.
And in November, I’ll be talking about Scottish song-collecting at the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow: ‘Scottish Song Collecting in the Context of Cultural Heritage: “A Mission of National Importance” (to quote Alexander Campbell)’.
By then the dedicated Stationers’ Hall issue of Brio will be hitting your letterboxes, too!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 