Welcome to my personal website. Here you’ll find up to date information about my research and various projects. If you want to know more or would like to collaborate, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am always interested in hearing from fellow researchers!
About my work
My research straddles the fields of medieval history, literary analysis, philology, manuscript studies, and religious studies, with a focus on the insular world. The concepts of personal eschatology, time, and the transmission of texts, manuscripts, and ideas have played a leading role in my research to date. My work primarily concerns Old Irish and Latin material, but also occasionally touches on Old English and medieval Dutch literature. In addition, I have an interest in the (historical) philosophy of education and in Higher Education in 20th century Ireland.
I am honoured to currently hold a dual position in Trinity. I am Assistant Professor in the School of Education, where I teach philosopy of education and educational theory, and where I am a member of the CAVE research centre. In the Department of History I am Priciple Investigator of the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme project “Early Irish Hands: The Development of Writing in Early Ireland”. I have previously held fellowships across Ireland, including an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Irish and Celtic Languages, Trinity College Dublin, and an O’Donovan Scholarship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. I subsequently held a fellowship at the IKGF in Erlangen. I have taught classes and courses at Trinity as well the universities of Cork and Maynooth. I obtained my PhD in Early and Medieval Irish from University College Cork as De Finibus Fellow. Before coming to Cork, I also completed an MPhil at Trinity College Dublin and two theses at the Radboud Unversity, Nijmegen, where I specialised in Anglo-Saxon England.
My current research addresses three core themes:
1. I am currently Principal Investigator of SFI-IRC Pathway programme research project Early Irish Hands: The Development of Writing in Early Ireland. This project broadly addresses the manuscript culture of medieval Ireland, with a particular focus on the study of early Irish script, writing techniques, and the materiality of manuscripts.
2. Research on the Martyrology of Óengus (Félire Óengusso), an early ninth-century metrical martyrology in Old Irish, as well as the devotional and literary aspects of insular martyrologies and calendars in general. For this latter purpose, I curated the exhibition HOLY TIME and launched the MARTRAE network, through which I hope to channel further collaborative research. Read more about the Félire on Félire Óengusso Online. The Celebrating the Saints conference, which was held in Trinity College in 2016, was also part of this project. An edited volume based on selected contributions from this conference is currently nearing completion. (Watch the News section for updates!)
3. Research on individual eschatology, the transmission of religious ideas, and apocrypha. I have previously written on the rhetoric of catastrophe and salvific measures in relation to apocalyptic rhetoric in an article on the twelfth-century text the Second Vision of Adomnán (edited in The End and Beyond, ed. J. Carey, et al. 2014), and on the context of the earliest adaptation of the Visio Pauli. I am currently preparing a monograph Journeys to the Afterlife: Moral Eschatology in Early Medieval Ireland for publication, based on my doctoral work on visions of the afterlife, and undertaking a new research project which builds on this, entitled ‘From Revelation to Ritual: Comparative Perspectives on Agency and Authority in Journeys to the Afterlife, 650-900’, with the generous support of the Internationales Kolleg für Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung in Erlangen. In most of these studies I also touch upon elements of literary theory, especially didactic writing and genre studies.
General Teaching Interests
My teaching interests ecompass the history of Christianity, the language, literature, history and manuscript culture of early Medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, and the philosophy of education. However, I have also taught assessment, medieval Dutch literature, Dutch language history and modern Dutch.
My areas of expertise include:
– the history of Christianity in the insular world, incl. hagiography and devotional literature, Church history, monasticism and asceticism, eschatology, and the transmission of biblical and apocryphal literature
– Old and Middle Irish and the history of the language
– editing, textual transmission, and manuscript studies, including codicology and the materiality of the book
– cultural and intellectual exchange in the Insular world
– literary history, genre studies and didactic modes of writing