Who’d have thought marking was such energetic mental exercise?! I might have a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in the Performing Arts – I might even have some experience in doing these activities – but I haven’t usually had to do marking. And now I’m almost all done – just one paper to go, this week, and that has got ‘Tomorrow’ written all over it. My brain has had enough for today.
Back soon.
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.)
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!
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!
There are times when our insatiable curiosity leads us ‘up the garden path’, aren’t there? For me, it’s when I decide to pursue the life history of characters that really aren’t central to what I’m researching.
Take this weekend: I’m currently researching the pedagogical output of a Victorian Edinburgh music teacher, and I discovered his daughter collaborated on some of his publications. (This is confirmed by a letter that her sister wrote to a music journal later.) The collaborations appear to have been before she married.
I found a newspaper article about a story she had written for a women’s magazine called The People’s Friend in 1906, and this gave me her married name, but also informed me that she was working as a head teacher in a village quite a way from Edinburgh. It was definitely her – it named her father and his achievements.
Oh, my goodness. I wrote a number of stories for that magazine myself, some decades ago, so that made me sit up and look, straight away!
More interestingly, though – for a married woman still to be working, was a red flag in itself, because it was usual for a woman to stop working when she married. I traced her marriage certificate on Scotland’s People, and only noticed at the last minute that there was an amendment attached. She divorced her husband – whereabouts unknown – in 1912. Perhaps she had found it expedient to continue working, notwithstanding having a young child, if there had already been marital discord for a while. But who knows?!
I found the mother, a nine-year old son and a servant living back in Edinburgh in 1911. The census described her just as a teacher – no mention of headship here.
Really, my only interest at this point – whether or not she continued to collaborate with her father after she married – was my curiosity about a woman working as a teacher after marriage. Not long ago, I researched a late Victorian woman called Clarinda Webster, who was a music teacher, head teacher and ultimately a divorcee, so there was a human interest in finding someone else whose circumstances might have been vaguely similar …
After a few hours delving into Ancestry, Scotland’s People and the British Newspaper Archive, I made myself stop. I don’t know where this woman and her son ended up. Maybe they left Scotland or emigrated, who knows? At the end of the day, it doesn’t make any difference to my research into pedagogical music publications in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
On the other hand, stories of working women professionals in that era continue to interest me, whether musicians, teachers or both. It wouldn’t take much to convince me to keep looking…
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 