Lecturer in Classics, University of Galway (Ireland)

  • Major funding success in medieval Irish studies

    Major funding success in medieval Irish studies

    Ground-breaking research into the history and culture of medieval Ireland has recently been undergoing a huge expansion, with significant investment coming from funding agencies in Ireland and the EU for a wide variety of ground-breaking research projects. This era is foundational for Irish culture for several reasons: The selection of recent major projects below represents…

  • A guide to finding manuscript images online

    A guide to finding manuscript images online

    Research on early medieval Latin manuscripts has been utterly transformed in the past 15 years or so by the ever-increasing availability of high-quality digital images online. Nonetheless, these collections are spread across many different online locations, and some are not easy to find. Here is some general guidance and a collection of useful links. General…

  • The impact of epidemics in ancient Greece and early Ireland

    The impact of epidemics in ancient Greece and early Ireland

    The Covid-19 crisis is a unique event in all of our lives, but it is by no means unique in human history. We have lived through very many mass outbreaks of infectious diseases. It may be some small comfort in the present circumstances to know that we have not just survived epidemics far worse, but in some…

  • Did a medieval Irish manuscript uncover a new word of Old Dutch?

    Did a medieval Irish manuscript uncover a new word of Old Dutch?

    It’s not often that medieval Irish manuscripts make the news – and it’s all the more unusual when they feature on Dutch national media. Last October, the Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad carried a report that a new word of Old Dutch had been discovered in an Irish manuscript. The newspaper reported that the word in question…

  • Some online bibliographies

    Some online bibliographies

    A few online bibliographical resources for early medieval philology (with an Irish focus).

  • A second research trip on East Asian glossing

    A second research trip on East Asian glossing

    In 2013 I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a research trip to Kyoto and Tokyo to explore, with other European colleagues, the similarities between reading practices in early medieval Europe and Japan in the period roughly 7th to 9th centuries. This summer we had the great fortune to make a return visit, where we had the opportunity…

  • Etymological notes on Sanskrit Buddhist terms

    Etymological notes on Sanskrit Buddhist terms

    Here are some very rough notes on Indo-European roots of Buddhist (and some Hindu) terms of Sanskrit origin that are fairly well-known in English. I couldn’t find a similar list anywhere else (in print or online), so I thought I’d share mine here.

  • Report on a research trip on East Asian glossing

    Report on a research trip on East Asian glossing

    Between 27 July and 1 August 2013 I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in an international workshop held in Japan aiming to explore affinities between the earliest glossing traditions of Europe and East Asia.

  • Maps for early Irish studies

    Maps for early Irish studies

    This post aims to collect some online map resources for early medieval Ireland. A knowledge of local geography and toponymy is often indispensable for researching early Irish history and literature, but equally often inaccessible due to changing names and the disappearance of sites.

  • Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds

    Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds

    This collection of essays, deriving from a Cambridge conference in 2007, has now been listed on the CUP website, due to appear in August 2012. I have a contribution exploring how Irish scholars around the seventh century derived a basic knowledge of Greek vocabulary from a range of Late Antique sources and how they applied…