Dr Simon Taylor and Prof. Thomas Clancy confront the task ahead.
Dr Simon Taylor and Prof. Thomas Clancy confront the task ahead.
The Department of Celtic and its AHRC-funded project, ‘The expansion and contraction of Gaelic in Medieval Scotland; the onomastic evidence’, will be funding a PhD studentship to commence 1 October 2006. The studentship, which is for three years is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The studentship will carry out research on Scottish place-names within the context of the overall project, which sets out to investigate the evidence of names, primarily place-names, for Gaelic in medieval Scotland, focusing on areas of eastern and southern Scotland, between the high and low tide-marks of Gaelic’s medieval expansion and contraction. The PhD research may focus or branch out in ways which suit the student's own research interests, but it will include an in-depth survey of the place-names of a region within the overall study area. The PhD will be conducted within the Department of Celtic, and under the supervision of the project’s director, Prof. Thomas Owen Clancy, and its chief researcher, Dr Simon Taylor.
Prof Thomas Clancy writes: The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded the Department of Celtic in the University of Glasgow a project grant of nearly £400,000 for a four-year project researching Gaelic names, in particular placenames. The project, ‘The Expansion and Contraction of Gaelic in Medieval Scotland: the onomastic evidence’ will be headed by myself, and the chief researcher on the project will be Dr Simon Taylor; there will be a further researcher, Gilbert Markus, and a doctoral student working on the project. The objective of the project is to understand better the way in which Gaelic expanded during the middle ages from Argyll across eastern and southern Scotland, and the means by which it had then receded from many of these areas by 1500. Our best, sometimes our only tools for understanding this process are place- and personal names. The project’s first objective will be to complete and see into publication Dr Taylor’s major 4 volume survey of The Place-Names of Fife (the first volume will appear this year). The research will then take the findings and methods used in Fife and apply them to test areas throughout the zone where Gaelic expanded and contracted during the middle ages. This will illuminate the nature of Gaelic settlement, interaction with other languages, and regional variation, and result in a further book: Gaelic in Medieval Scotland: The Evidence of Names. This is a long-awaited boost for name scholarship in Scotland, and the Department of Celtic at Glasgow, along with colleagues in other departments, hope to be able to build on this in the future.
Prof Thomas Clancy,
Department of Celtic
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Phone: 0141 330 4222
e-mail: t.clancy@celtic.arts.gla.ac.uk