Emily Lyle


Emily Lyle is a Scottish ballad scholar and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Biography

Emily Lyle grew up in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire, Scotland. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews, followed by an education course at the University of Glasgow.
For six years she taught English in secondary schools in Britain and New Zealand before she was appointed as a Lecturer in English at Ripon College of Education in Yorkshire. While employed as a Senior Lecturer in English at Neville’s Cross College in Durham, she wrote her doctoral dissertation "A Study of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin in Literature and Tradition" at the Institute of Folk-Life Studies at the University of Leeds. Moving away from the teaching of English literature, she soon established herself in the field of Scottish studies.

Academic career

In 1976-77, she went to Australia as a visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. There she collected oral material from those with Scottish connections, some of which is included in the CD “Chokit on a Tattie”, and in a forthcoming issue of the journal Tochter. In 1977, Lyle donated copies of her tape recordings to the National Library of Australia. The work she did as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 1974-75 gave her increased visibility as a ballad scholar and led to many more visits to Harvard, including an appointment at the Center for the Study of World Religions in 1995.
She was appointed as a Research Fellow at the School of Scottish Studies of the University of Edinburgh from 1970 to 1995 and as a Lecturer from 1995 to 1998. In 1978 she was Visiting Professor of Folklore at the University of California at Los Angeles; from 1979-1982 she was a Visiting Lecturer in Folklife Studies at the University of Stirling from 1979 to 1982. Since 1998 she has been an Honorary Fellow in the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at Edinburgh.

Traditional Cosmology Society

Honours

Books