Alumni

Celeste L. Andrews
 
Celeste

Celeste completed her PHD in Celtic in 2023. She earned a BA in Medieval Studies and History from Smith College in 2013, an MLitt in Medieval Studies from the University of St Andrews in 2014, and an MA in Medieval Welsh Literature from Aberystwyth University in 2016. At St Andrews, she wrote a dissertation examining how Welsh national/ethnic identity was reflected in the Cambro-Latin saints’ Lives of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. At Aberystwyth, she wrote on the legacy of Magnus Maximus/Maxen Wledig (and, more generally, Rome) in medieval Wales. Her primary research interests are ethnic and national identity in medieval Britain and how stories, legends, and traditions can affect that identity and influence the surrounding political culture. Email: clandrews@g.harvard.edu

 

Erin Boon

Erin Boone

Erin completed her PhD in the Celtic department in May 2014 after successfully defending her dissertation, Heritage Welsh: a study of heritage language as the outcome of minority language acquisition and bilingualism. Her research interests include heritage language, L1 and L2 acquisition, syntax, morphology, phonology, and minority language policy in the UK and Ireland. Her dissertation project created corpora of heritage and baseline Welsh narrative samples and analyzed them for signs of reanalysis and simplification in the heritage Welsh grammar. Details about her work can be found at erinboon.com.

After leaving the department, Erin applied her linguistics and research expertise to roles in the tech industry and digital publishing, first within Google's speech data team then as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at The Texas Tribune. She further developed her research skills with a Statistics MS and is currently a Data Scientist at The Atlantic. Her professional profile can be found on LinkedIn.
 

Matthieu Boyd

M. Boyd

Matthieu, a 2011 graduate of the department, is now Professor of Literature and Chair of the School of the Humanities at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Recent projects include The Medieval French Ovide moralisé: An English Translation with K. Sarah-Jane Murray (Boydell & Brewer, 2023), and a new translation of The Táin and Other Stories from the Ulster Cycle, to be published by Broadview Press in 2024. For more about Matthieu, see http://fdu.academia.edu/MBoyd/About.

 

Kassandra Conley

Kassandra Connelly

Kassandra Conley completed her PhD in the Celtic department in May 2014. Before coming to Harvard, she received a BA in English and History from Centre College and an MA in English from the University of Georgia. She has presented papers on a variety of topics, including uses of the Alexander Romance in bardic poetry, parody in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy, and giants in sixteenth century Welsh historiography. Her current research interests include pseudo-history, ethnography and geography, late medieval and early modern British mulitlingualism, and postcolonial theory. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Experiencing Wonder in Wales, 1300-1600," considers middle Welsh representations of the marvelous as well as how these representations found new political uses during the Tudor era after the establishment of the Acts of Union. In her increasingly infrequent spare time, she enjoys traveling, reading bad Welsh language pulp fiction, and exploring Boston.

Greg Darwin

Dr. Gregory Darwin

Gregory Darwin is a Senior Lecturer in Irish at Uppsala University, where he teaches courses on modern and medieval Irish language and literature. He earned a PhD from the department of Celtic Languages and Literatures in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Mar gur Dream Sí iad atá ag Mairiúnt fén Bhfarraige: ML 4080 ‘The Seal Woman’ in its Irish and International Context”, which examined legends of marriage between humans and beings from the sea in Irish, Scottish, and Nordic oral narrative traditions. Previously, he has held positions as a Lecteur de langue etrangère at Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, and as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project Classical Influences and Irish Culture (CLIC) at Aarhus University. His research focuses on maritime folklore, migratory legends of the supernatural, popular belief and magic, Gaelic and Scandinavian cultural exchange, Classical reception in early modern Gaelic literature, and modern and early modern poetry in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

 

Deborah Furchtgott

Deborah

Deborah completed her Ph.D. in Celtic Languages and Literatures in 2019. In 2009 she received a BA from the University of Toronto with a specialization in English literature and a major in Celtic Studies. She remained in Toronto to earn an MA through the Centre for Medieval Studies the following year working with both Celtic and Old French literature and studying Medieval Latin intensively. Although interested in the literary and manuscript culture of twelfth and thirteenth century Wales and how it relates to the thriving exchange of literary ideas across Britain and Europe as a whole, she focuses mostly on Middle Welsh and Old French poetry of the courtly tradition. Most recently she presented a paper entitled "Ystorya Adaf ac Efa Wreic and the Apocryphal Narratives of the White Book of Rhydderch" at the 31st Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

 

Georgia Henley

Dr. HenleyGeorgia Henley is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Anselm College and a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Her research focuses on medieval historical writing, Latinity, and literary transmission in the borderlands between Wales and England. Her monograph, Memory on the Margins: Reimagining the Past in the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands, is in preparation. She has published in the Journal of Medieval Latin, North American Journal of Celtic Studies, Arthurian Literature, and Viator. She has co-edited Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic (University of Wales Press, 2018); A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth (Brill, 2020); Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2020); and The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March: New Contexts, Studies, and Texts (Brepols, 2020).

 

Matthew Holmberg

M. Holmberg

Matthew Holmberg received his Ph.D. from the department in the Spring of 2017. His dissertation was entitled "Towards a Relative Chronology of the Milesian Genealogical Scheme." His interest in Celtic Studies began at University of California–Berkeley where he earned his B.A. with Honors in 2008. In 2010 he completed NUI–Maynooth's taught M.A. program in Early and Medieval Irish. Currently, Matthew is teaching Irish at Boston College and Harvard while continuing his research into the medieval Irish genealogies.

 

 

 

Michaela Jacques

Dr. Michaela JacquesMichaela Jacques is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She earned her PhD from the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures in 2020, with a dissertation entitled “The Reception and Transmission of the Bardic Grammars in Late Medieval and Early Modern Wales”. Broadly interested in medieval and early modern Welsh poetry and intellectual history, her current project examines a major early modern revision of the medieval Welsh bardic grammars (Pum Llyfr Kerddwriaeth), and its connections to both the Welsh bardic order and Welsh humanism. 
 

 

 

Aled Llion Jones

Aled Jones

Aled graduated from the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures in May 2011. His PhD thesis was a study of the early Welsh prophetic poetry (darogan) from both "traditional" empirical and literary theoretical perspectives. The thesis title was "‘Ol wrth ol attor ar eu hennyd’: Political Prophecy in the Earliest Welsh Manuscripts (c. 1250 - c. 1540)."

Working with Polish, Irish, French and German as well as his native languages, he has published translations and co-translations of poetry and prose between Welsh, Polish, English and Italian, as well as a number of articles. At recent conferences he has spoken on various aspects of Irish and Welsh literature, medieval and modern. He has also researched, published and presented on the Welsh in America.

He is currently Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Bangor University.

Fields of Interest: Medieval Welsh-language literature (prose and poetry); cultures and history of Wales (medieval and modern); medieval prophetics and apocalyptics; poetics and the Welsh and Irish strict metres; literary theory; philosophy of language; sociolinguistics, minority languages and language rights, bilingualism / multilingualism; the Welsh in America. Email: aled.llion@bangor.ac.uk

 

Katherine Leach

KateKate finished her doctorate in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern charms found in Welsh manuscripts. She is interested in the intersection of magic, medicine, and religion. She finished a dissertation on healing charms in Welsh manuscripts from circa 1375-1600. Before coming to Harvard, Kate completed an MA in Medieval Welsh Literature from Aberystwyth University, where she wrote a thesis on animal transformation and sexual transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. She earned a BA in Classics, with a minor in linguistic anthropology from Hunter College (City University of New York). Kate is also a Resident Tutor in Pforzheimer House. Email: katherineleach@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

 

Edyta Lehmann

Edyta Lehmann

Edyta Lehmann completed her PhD in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures in 2012 after defending her dissertation, "The Power of Words: Female Speech as a Narrative Force in Irish Tales across Centuries." Before coming to Harvard, Edyta received an MA in Polish Philology from the University of Wroclaw, Poland and an MA in English from the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include Modern Irish, contemporary poetry in Irish, postcolonial theory and film. She has presented and published on a variety of topics, often focusing on the portrayal and function of female characters in Irish texts. While at Harvard, she taught courses on Modern Irish and Irish sagas, as well as folklore and mythology, comparative literature, and Polish film. She is engaged in initiatives supporting multilingual learning and inclusive education. Email: elehmann@post.harvard.edu

Joey McMullen

J. McMullen

Joey McMullen is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He graduated in 2015 with a Ph.D. in English and Celtic Literatures and Languages. His research interests include landscape perception and the function of place in early insular literature (especially Irish, Welsh, and English), ecocriticism, and connections between Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Ireland and Wales. His dissertation, “Echoes of Early Irish Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes,” focused on connections between the representation of nature and the landscape in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and that of early Ireland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anglo-Saxon England, Arthuriana, English Studies, Studia Celtica Fennica, and the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, as well as several edited collections. He is currently co-editing two volumes of essays: The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its After-lives (forthcoming with ACMRS) and Gerald of Wales: Interpretation and Innovation in Medieval Britain (forthcoming with the University of Wales Press).

Natasha Sumner

Sumner

Natasha completed a PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures with a secondary concentration in Comparative Literature in spring 2015. Her dissertation traced the historical development of the Fenian narrative tradition—i.e. the vast body of story and song, some of it well over a millennium old, about the Gaelic hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his roving warrior band. The dissertation was supplemented by a catalogue of modern Fenian folklore containing metadata for over 3,300 folklore items. 

In a recent project, she completed the transcription and translation used to subtitle the re-discovered film, Oidhche Sheanchais, directed by Robert Flaherty and restored by the Harvard Film Archive (2015 [1935]).  She joined the faculty of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard as Assistant Professor in autumn 2015.

Visit her website for more information: http://scholar.harvard.edu/natashasumner  Email: nsumner@fas.harvard.edu

 

Sarah Zeiser

Sarah Zeizer

 

Sarah Zeiser received her PhD in Celtic Languages & Literatures with a secondary in Medieval Studies in 2012. She holds a BA in Medieval Studies from Smith College. While earning her PhD, Sarah was a Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London, as well as a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellow. Her doctoral dissertation “Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in Late-Eleventh-Century Wales” explores the complex interactions among language, text, and political context in Wales during the decades surrounding the Norman Conquest of England. After three years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department, Sarah is now an Associate of the Department and Project Manager and Special Assistant to the Dean in the Division of Arts & Humanities at Harvard.