Paris

I’m a bit of a juggler at the moment!  The Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network has a dedicated Brio issue forthcoming in November, which I’ll be co-editing with Martin Holmes, the regular editor.  Various articles have been promised, and I need to do some writing as well.  Not to mention needing to do some book-reviews.  I have several ideas there – I need to order some books that I’ve recently come across, to decide if they’d be usefully reviewed for our music librarian audience.

I also need to revise an article for another journal – I first wrote it a couple of years ago –  to reflect the fact that the network came into being and more work has since been done.

But before that – next week I’m heading to the Sorbonne in Paris, as an invited speaker, to talk about Sir John Macgregor Murray’s involvement in Gaelic culture and song-collecting.  The man who got a couple of passing mentions in my thesis and book, has been a major focus for historians interested in his involvement in commissioning and collecting Persian manuscripts on Indian customs and culture, whilst he was active in the East India Company’s private army.  I’ll be the only musicologist there – I’ve polished my paper within an inch of its life, so hopefully it will be of interest to scholars from a different discipline and with a different focus.  I made a page about Sir John, which you can visit if you’d like to know more about the man.

I’ve been awarded an Athenaeum Award by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to enable me to attend the whole of the International Society of Eighteenth Century Studies conference in Edinburgh in July, where I’ll be joining a panel on paratext.  I think paratext is probably one of my all-time favourite research topics, so this is very exciting.

But to clear the decks for some serious writing about paratext, I got my next speaking opportunity all written up and timed well ahead of schedule: I’m talking about copyright and John Cage in a Pecha Kucha presentation at the CILIP Icepops seminar on copyright literacy education towards the end of June.  Writing to fit 20 slides each lasting for 20 seconds is a rather different challenge to writing a conference paper!  Here’s a hint: if you Google it, you’ll find yourself recommended to write 60 words per slide.  However, if you use a lot of long words, then this advice is not for you!!  Take it from one who [now] knows!

I’m attending the Icepops conference in Edinburgh with my librarian hat on.  In fact, I was at Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago for the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase roadshow – an interesting update – and a couple of days ago, I went to Dundee for a Rare Books Scotland meeting.  Again, I wore my librarian hat, but had the opportunity to share an update on the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network whilst I was at it.

And what else?  As I mentioned, I have a glorious idea for a new grant application … but I’ll keep that under my hat until plans are a bit more advanced….