Steve is an ex-academic musicologist / critical theorist whose specialisms include the dark matter of the Scottish Enlightenment. His first degree was in music from the University of Nottingham (1988), and his PhD was titled The Sonorous Body: Music, Enlightenment and Deconstruction, at the University of Edinburgh (1992). He subsequently lectured in popular musicology at Salford University, music and literature at the Open University, aesthetics and cultural studies at Portsmouth University, critical musicology at the University of Leeds and finally popular musicology at the University of the Highlands and Islands (Perth College). He has worked as a reviewer and writer for The Musical Times, Tempo, Cencrastus and various other journals. In 1999 he was the founding editor of Celtic Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary online journal, for which he still works as Internet Editor. He has also had editorial positions on the board of Popular Musicology Quarterly and was a primary mover in turning it into an online journal, re-titled as Popular Musicology Online. Aside from his editorials roles for online journals, in 2001, he fell out of the ivory tower. Subsequently, he re-trained with a Postgraduate Diploma in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow at the same moment that West Lothian's "Silicon Glen" fell off the map. He has since occasionally found work in various short-term I.T. contracts, including online domain sales for Hostroute, as an e-learning instructional designer for Aberdeen College, and even less gainfully as a freelance P.C. and website odd-jobber. In between such things, he has also been the Historic Scotland steward at Cairnpapple Hill, and worked in the voluntary sector for several organisations, including the Bennie Museum in Bathgate. During this period, his local history websites (initially a hobby, written on an amateur basis) began attracting invitations for public lecturing and media appearances. By late 2008, he finally realised that the apparently-disparate dead-ends of his career in fact all pointed in one direction — professionalising these websites, both academically and technologically. In February 2009, Ancient Lothian became his first experiment in this new direction. The cyber-scribe can be contacted here.