New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 5: Kirsteen McCue

The WPHP Monthly Mercury

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.
This fifth (and final) bonus episode features our conversation with Kirsteen McCue. We spoke to her the day she presented her Stephen Copley Memorial Lecture, '"Melodys of Earth and Sky": The National Air and Romantic Lyric.' Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and the co-director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Most recently, she has edited the fourth volume of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns: Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson (2021) and a collection of essays titled An Orkney Tapestry (2021).