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 feel free to contact me.
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. My current work centres on Irish manuscript studies and palaeography. In addition, 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 Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History in Trinity College Dublin. I am Principal Investigator of the Research Ireland Pathway Programme project “Early Irish Hands: The Development of Writing in Early Ireland” as well as PI of CLÓSCAPE (as Trinity Long Room Hub Research Associate) and co-I of Wandering Books (TRDA-funded). 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 as at 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 research typically addresses the following themes:
Manuscripts
I am currently Principal Investigator of the Research Ireland Pathway programme project Early Irish Hands: The Development of Writing in Early Ireland. This project investigates the manuscript culture of medieval Ireland, with a particular focus on the study of early Irish script, writing techniques, and the materiality of manuscripts. I am also co-I of Wandering Books, which seeks to integrate methodologies for localizing manuscripts, including material and palaeographic analysis, corpus philology, textual criticism and genetics.
Martyrologies
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 martyrologies in the insular world is currently nearing completion. (Watch for updates!)
Irish Cultural Heritage
I am running a pilot project called CLÓSCAPE which investigates the roll-out of cló gaelach street signage in Dublin City. This project grew out of the Irish in Outlook project as well as the Early Irish Hands project. As part of this project, I will create a digital archive and survey of Dublin cló gaelach street signage.
Digital Humanities
Most of my projects involve DH elements, including python (EIH), digitisation and digital curation (CLÓSCAPE, MARTRAE). I also teach digital codicology and palaeography elements on the M.Phil. in Medieval Studies and I am a member of ANTIDOTE, an Erasmus+ consortium which teaches digital humanities methodologies for working with pre-modern texts (2024-27).
Eschatology
I have produced significant 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 on my experiences gained from the project ‘From Revelation to Ritual: Comparative Perspectives on Agency and Authority in Journeys to the Afterlife, 650-900’, which was generously supported by 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 encompasses 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 and curriculum development, medieval Dutch literature, Dutch language history and modern Dutch.
My areas of expertise include:
- Irish manuscript culture, including codicology and the materiality of the book
- 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
- textual criticism, textual transmission, genre studies, and didactic modes of writing
- cultural and intellectual exchange in the Insular world