Probably the most eventful year I’ve ever reported, 2024 saw plenty of action. However, I’d like to add a few words of explanation before I go any further. Firstly, everyone’s different and everyone’s circumstances are different. (You know the old saying about how you have to ‘walk a mile in someone’s shoes’ before you understand their experiences and challenges?) I’ve spent far too long on introspection, measuring myself unfavourably against high-achievers. It gets you nowhere, apart from feeling inadequate. You will know what is possible in your own situation; please don’t feel I’ve set myself up as an example. I’ve done it my way.
If you’re on the tenure track hamster wheel elsewhere in the world, you may read this and wonder at how little I’ve achieved. On the other hand, if you’re not employed as an academic, you might be surprised at how much. If you’re fully retired, you may think I’ve lost my marbles, but if you’re semi-retired, you might understand! Similarly, everyone’s personal circumstances at home are different too.
For full disclosure, my research career has been what you’d now call alt-ac (alternative academic); I have had 10½ paid hours a week on research for over a decade, but my main career has been in music librarianship. (I’ve never been a full-time academic, and my outputs were achieved in less than one third of my working week.) As you’ll see, I recently gave a keynote about being ‘alt-ac’, and I’d certainly be open to further bookings of this kind, if your institution or network was interested. (I’m in the UK.)
Highlights
- I had successful eye surgery in February.
- I retired from librarianship at the end of June.
- I was promoted to part-time postdoctoral research fellow in July (10½ hours a week).
- I’ve had the opportunity to do some teaching cover.
- My second monograph was published. (It has a 2025 imprint, but actually came out in autumn 2024.)
- I was elected a Fellow of IAML (UK & Ireland) in the spring, and of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in November.
- I was keynote speaker for the ECRN Alt-Ac Showcase at the University of Birmingham.
- I successfully applied for a research fellowship at IASH (the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities) at the University of Edinburgh, which I shall be taking up between January and June 2025.
- I received the Mervyn Heard Award from the Magic Lantern Society in December, for research into Bayley and Ferguson’s service of song publications.
Four fellowships of various kinds is quite an impressive number, however you look at it, so I must remind myself of this before I start beating myself up about my relatively modest upward progress!
Publications
- A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951 (Routledge, 2025)
- Book Review: Gun Sireadh, Gun Irraidh: The Tolmie Collection (Folk Music Journal Vol.12 no.5, pp.127-9; my review of a new edition of the Tolmie Collection, a significant Gaelic song anthology, here re-edited by Kenna Campbell and Ainsley Hamill)
- [Article withdrawn due to pressures of time, but published on this blog: ‘The Exhilaration and Exasperation of Hybridity: Third-Space Professionalism in the Library’]
- 2 accepted chapters pending publication.
- 2 articles recently submitted, pending peer review. [February 2025 update: one got through peer review, has been revised, edited and I’ve approved the proofs. The other got through peer review and now awaits the revisions. Nonetheless, satisfactory progress!]
Speaker
- Exchange Talk, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Jan 2024, ‘From Magic Lantern to Microphone: the Scottish Music Publishers & Pedagogues inspiring Hearts & Minds through Song’
- NAG (National Acquisitions Group) Talk, April 2024, ‘Redressing the Balance: Getting Historically Under-Represented Composers and Contemporary Environmental Concerns into Library Stock’
- Print Networks, conference held at University of Newcastle, July 2024, ‘‘Music for All’: the Rise and Fall of Scottish Music Publishing, 1880-1964’
- Exchange Talk, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Nov 2024, ‘The Glory of Scotland’ (it’s the title of a Scottish song book published for the 1951 Festival of Britain)
- Keynote for ECRN Alt-Ac Showcase at the University of Birmingham, Nov 2024, ‘My Alt-Ac Life’
Other Activities
- BBC Scotland: ‘Good Morning Scotland’ interview
- Book launch
- Fellowships of IAML(UK) and RCS
- Mervyn Peak Award, Magic Lantern Society
- New job title: Post Doctoral Research Fellow
- Peer reviews for AHRC and a scholarly journal
- Providing teaching cover
- Successful application: Heritage Collections Research Fellowship, IASH (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh), for Jan-June 2025.
Forward Planning
My IASH Fellowship will allow me the opportunity to explore the former Edinburgh publisher, Thomas Nelson’s archives, to find out more about their publishing in the music field. There wasn’t a great amount, but I aim to explore correspondence and find out how it fits into the wider range of their activities. I’ll be spending more of my time on research than I ever have since 1982!
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on an article for a history publication; I want to get that finished in the near future, so that I can turn my attention to another article on a different topic. What I do after that will probably depend on how the IASH Fellowship research goes, and what interesting possibilities reveal themselves to me. There’s bound to be enough for an article. But could I expand it to something book-length? I’ll have to wait and see!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 