Top companies your searchers work at

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Clip of the LinkedIn section listing the top companies my searches work at

Linked in won’t tell me much, without my paying for Premium membership, which I’m not going to do. Still they’ll tell me the top three companies my searchers work at. Frankly, I’m surprised by their names. I’m particularly surprised that IQVIA (a real company) has looked me up again, considering I have spoken to a real, live person – well, I assume she was real and live – to point out that I am absolutely not who they are looking for. So, why have they looked me up again? Didn’t they remove me from their list of hopefuls, as I rather strongly suggested?

This is Who I am Not

I am not, never have been, never will be a medic of any description. Do they really think that just because I have a PhD and am a post doctoral research fellow, I must therefore be a medical researcher?

I was not a straight-A-in-every-subject all-rounder: I have one narrowly-passed O-Level in Physical Chemistry. That’s is my sole scientific credential. The other ten O-Levels, and all subsequent qualifications, are non-scientific.

This is Who I am

I work in a Conservatoire! (To anyone in the USA, it would be called a conservatory.) I’m a musicologist, and my historical research crosses over into social history.

Anyway, to make things easier for them, I have improved my profile. Before tonight, perhaps it was a little ambiguous – to headhunters not familiar with what a Conservatoire is all about:-

Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Athenaeum Award for Leng Medal Memories research project.

And now?

This is What I do

Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Athenaeum Award for Leng Medal Memories research project into a Dundee Scots Song Competition 🎵.

  • I haven’t said I’m ‘Open to’ work of any kind, because I’m semi-retired, live in Glasgow with an elderly spouse, and could only possibly entertain part-time research which did not entail relocation.
  • I don’t wish to Enhance my profile using AI.
  • I shall, however, Add a section to help clarify that medical research is really, truly not my forte! I’ve linked to my publications list, and featured the paper I’m giving at the Royal Academy of Music’s September conference, Women and Musical Histories, 1789-1914:- ‘The Trumpet Major’s ‘Poetess’ Widow; the Scottish Shipping Magnate’s Daughter and the Retired Barrister: The Importance of Parental Support to Musically Gifted Girls in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Eras’.

Having written my conference paper and devised a PowerPoint, it’ll be back to transcribing oral history interviews on Thursday. The kind of thing you’d expect a musicologist/social historian to be doing, in fact!

And it Goes on

A week later – now we have pharmaceutical companies and animal health experts looking me up. What do I have to do …. ?!

Mother and Son both Routledge Authors

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Book cover: Street-by-Street Retrofit

Our talented son, Scott McAulay, has just shared with us an image of his latest triumph – a foreword in another Routledge book. (He’s less than half my age, so who knows how much he’ll have published by the time he reaches my advanced years!)

So, this year, between us we’ve had a hand in three Routledge books, or four if you include the paperback edition of one I contributed to earlier:-

Scott McAulay (foreword), in Mike McEvoy, Street-by-Street Retrofit: A Future for Architecture (2024)

Karen E. McAulay, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951 (2024)

Scott McAulay (chapter and a co-authored chapter) in The Pedagogies of Re-Use: The International School of Re-Construction (2024), ed. Duncan Baker-Brown, Graeme Brooker

Karen E. McAulay (chapter) in new paperback edition of Music by Subscription: Composers and their Networks in the British Music-Publishing Trade, 1676–1820 (2024, hardback 2022)

Exchange Talk Given, Book Launched

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

A quick post to mark a successful and very enjoyable evening. I gave my research exchange talk tonight at RCS. It was about a book of Scottish songs almost certainly published for the Festival of Britain in 1951. I talked about history, book history, music history, Scottish tourism and that all important catch-phrase for the Festival of Britain – ‘A Tonic for the Nation’. And then there was my book launch afterwards.

RCS wasn’t on Renfrew Street in 1951. We were the Royal Scottish Academy of Music at that point, in the old Athenaeum building (Nelson Mandela Place), but we had established a drama department in 1950 – the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art. (More about our history – click here.)

It’s fair to say that the book I talked about tonight – The Glories of Scotland, published by local publisher Mozart Allan – would not have been required repertoire for the talented students passing through our doors in 1951. It wasn’t aimed at high-performing classical artistes. (I doubt the library even had a copy in 1951, but there’s no way of finding out now. Anyway, we have recently acquired it!)

Nonetheless, the songbook does have a place in Glasgow’s history, in its own unique way.

Books relaxing after a night out!

After the exchange talk, we launched my book about amateur music making, Scottish national identity and Scottish music publishing. Professor Stephen Broad introduced it, and said some very kind words about it. There were friends and colleagues there whom I hadn’t seen for a while, so it was very sociable as well as celebratory.

Book launch: my ‘few words’ in response

My thanks go to everyone who contributed to make the evening so successful – Research Exchange colleagues, Library former colleagues, and the box office events team. I’m ‘dead chuffed’, as they say.