European recognition for the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies

Left to right: Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, Dr Esther Le Mair and Dr Simon Rodway from the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University.

Left to right: Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, Dr Esther Le Mair and Dr Simon Rodway from the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University.

08 May 2019

The Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University is celebrating a double success in the prestigious EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship scheme.

Dr Esther Le Mair has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship which will see her work on the historical linguistics of Welsh and Irish, principally the subjecthood of Old Irish, alongside Dr Simon Rodway.

Dr Le Mair will be based in the Department for a period of two years from October 2019.

A specialist in Old Irish verbal morphology and syntax, Dr Le Mair is a graduate of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the National University of Ireland Galway where she completed her PhD.

She has also worked as a post-doctoral researcher on a European Research Council project at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, Lecturer in Celtic Studies, has also been awarded a two year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship which will see him seconded to the renowned Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Dr Ó Muircheartaigh’s project, ‘An Icelander among the Gaels’, is expected to start in 2020 and he will work on a corpus of important Gaelic manuscripts collected by the eighteenth century Icelandic scholar and antiquarian Grimur Thorkelin, best known as the ‘discoverer’ of Beowulf.

Open to all academic disciplines and to post-doctoral and established scholars alike, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship competition attracts over 9,000 applications each year with a success rate of around 12.5%.

Speaking of this European success, Dr Cathryn Charnell-White, Head of the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University said: “These European awards speak to the international status of the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies as a centre of research excellence, and highlight our connectedness to partners in Europe at what is a crucial time for international intellectual cooperation.”

Dr Anwen Jones, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Aberystwyth University, said: “We are delighted for the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies on what is a remarkable performance in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship competition. We look forward to building on this success in the future, and to welcoming further Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellows to Aberystwyth to work on Welsh and Celtic Studies.”

Scholars interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies are encouraged to get in touch.