Gary West Author & Editor

Simon McKerrell has interdisciplinary research interests focused upon the social impact of music and how this relates to policy. He is the author of Focus: ScottishTraditional Music (2015), and the co-editor of Music as Multimodal Discourse:Media, Power and Protest (2017). He is currently Associate Dean for Research & Innovation in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University. He has previously held positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and at the National Piping Centre in Glasgow.

Gary West holds a personal chair in Scottish Ethnology at the University of Edinburgh, where he also serves as Director of the European Ethnological Research Centre. His key teaching and research interests examine the ways in which we relate to the past from within the present, and he has published widely in the fields of folklore, tradition, heritage and traditional music. He is chair of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, a past board member of Creative Scotland, and he presents Pipeline, a weekly specialist music programme on BBC Radio Scotland. He is also an active musician, having toured widely in the UK, Europe and North America, and has performed on around 30 CDs.