Languages, Literatures, & Cultures

Dr. Cassie Smith-Christmas is a Lecturer in Children's Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of the family and society, particularly within the sociolinguistic sub-field known as 'Family Language Policy, ' and especially on children's agency in language revitalisation. She is currently a SFI-IRC Pathways awardee for her project 'Gaeltacht Families and Multilingualism (GAELFAM),' which centres on families living in Gaeltacht areas who speak a language in addition to/other than Irish or English in the home. This follows on other funded research fellowships and projects, including a Marie Sk¿odowska-Curie Action project ( 'Language, Families, and Society' LaFS; Grant No. 794800); the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (with Orlaith Ruiséal; 'An Nasc Idir an Teanga agus an Pobal i gCorca Dhuibhne/The Intersection of Language and Community in Corca Dhuibhne'); an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship (The Challenges of Minority Language Maintenance: Family Language Policy in Scotland and Ireland'; GOIPD/2016/644); as well as research fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and Soillse, the interuniversity Scottish Gaelic research network, at the University of the Highlands and Islands

Cassie's publications include a monograph Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home (Palgrave, 2016), which continued her work on three generations of Gaelic-speaking family on the Isle of Skye undertaken as part of her PhD thesis (University of Glasgow, 2012).  She is also co-editor of two volumes, Gaelic in Contemporary Scotland:  The Revitalisation of an Endangered Language (University of Edinburgh Press, 2018) and New Speakers of Minority Languages: Linguistic Ideologies and Practices (Palgrave, 2018).

She has taught a number of courses and workshops on different aspects of language and social life, as well as research methods courses, including NVivo software training. She was also an invited lecturer for the MultiLing Winter School at the University of Oslo and a guest lecturer in an Erasmus+ exchange at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, as well as an invited guest researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.