Languages, Literatures, & Cultures

From an early fascination with mythology and ancient languages, I became a specialist in ancient Greek epic poetry, to which I added a new focus of interest in the renewal and transformation of the Classical tradition in medieval languages and literatures, especially in Irish between c. 900 and 1200 AD. With my colleagues in Galway Classics I have worked to give our research programme a particular focus on continuity and reception, with special reference to the Christian Middle Ages in general and the Insular worlds of Britain and Ireland in particular.  My own research is dominated by three linked projects: (a) studies in linguistic and cultural transfer from Graeco-Roman Antiquity to medieval vernacular literatures, especially Middle Irish; (b) comparative study of epic poetry, including the traditions of Greek, Latin, Near Eastern languages, and of medieval Irish and Germanic in their Latinate context; (c) semantic reconstruction and lexicography, esp. through the lens of cognitive linguistics.  

In the field of heroic literature I have a special interest in Middle Irish recreations of Greek mythology and pseudo-history, focussing on the largely unpublished late Middle Irish recension of Togail Troí­, the Irish rendering of the Trojan War. Among a series of article-length publications on this work, I have contributed an edition of the previously unpublished Prologue of the work, which appeared in Eriu  64 (2014). This work is analogous to, but formally quite separate from, the more origins-oriented work that I have published in Achilles Beside Gilgamesh (2019). The next challenge is to bring these research directions together in a new synthesis, which will lead (all going well) to further publications on the balance between creativity and tradition in medieval recreations of pagan mythology.

I am currently supervising PhD research on medieval recreations of the Trojan War narrative in Latin and Old Norse; on the concept of elegy in Old English poetry; on literature in Greek by Hellenistic Jewish authors, and by Late Antique poets from Egypt; and on lexical semantics in ancient Greek. I will be glad to hear from postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers interested in joining our departmental community in any fields in which I am competent to work with them.