Singing Robert Burns

This lecture will focus on Robert Burns as a song collector, editor and writer. Burns began writing songs right at the start of his career and he would be associated with well over 300 songs in his lifetime - the most famous of which is 'Auld Lang Syne'.

He collected songs he had heard sung in his own communities, along with working closely on two influential published song collections during his short life.

We will hear about these projects - and listen to some of the songs - and learn about how Burns's songs would become famous in Europe through connections with composers like Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann.

Burns' life story will be covered amongst the songs, and there will also be time for your questions.

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow were she was Associate and then Co -Director of the award-winning Centre for Robert Burns Studies (2007-22). She has published widely on Romantic song culture, including essays on Women songwriters, Lord Byron and John Clare, and on Robert Burns’s songs and musical responses to Burns’s work.

She is editor of two editions of songs by James Hogg for the Stirling/South Carolina research edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (EUP 2014) and co-editor, with Pam Perkins, of Women’s Travel Writings in Scotland (Routledge 2017). Her edition of Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson, vol 4. of the Oxford Works of Robert Burns, appeared in 2021.

Between 2017-2019 she led a network of scholars working on British National Song culture during the period 1750–1850, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh ( the Romantic National Song Network) and she has led the relaunch of the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation, another RSE network, between 2021-23.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2024 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.