FRSE and Leverhulme Award for Professor Sutton

Congratulations to Professor Emma Sutton whose work has been recognised this year with two awards. In April, Professor Sutton was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy, and she has now (December) been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for a project entitled ‘Hearing the Pacific: Robert L. Stevenson and musical cultures in colonial Oceania’.

Professor Sutton is one of two literary critics among 57 Fellows elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2024 from the arts, business, public service, civil society, and academia. Fellows are appointed on ‘three dimensions of excellence: outstanding achievement, professional standing and societal contribution.’

The Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship will enable Professor Sutton to complete a book which is the first on music’s role in the life and work of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and an innovative case-study of music’s role in colonial history. Stevenson – a self-taught composer of over 130 musical works – spent the last six years of his life in Oceania when Euro-American annexation of Pacific islands was at its height. He studied and collected Pacific music and performed with musicians from Sāmoan workers to the Hawai‘ian monarchs.

The book documents music’s role in colonisation and indigenous resistance to it across the Pacific, and is informed by a decade’s archival work in Oceania. It explores these forgotten musical networks, providing a wealth of new information about Stevenson and the Pacific musicians he knew. The monograph is part of a project co-created in long-term collaboration with indigenous Pacific musicians and partners for whom the fellowship includes funds.

The wider research project has created bi-lingual public-facing resources on customary Samoan music in collaboration with National University of Samoa. Led by Susau Solomona, the NUS team have gathered cultural knowledge about Samoan music from more than sixty elders and are developing pedagogical resources from primary to HE level. A customary meeting house (fale) and instruments including 4-metre-long slit drums (lali), were completed this year and will be used in teaching, graduation and ceremonial occasions at NUS. The project has appeared in 6 TV broadcasts in Samoa and featured throughout the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM 24) in Samoa in October.