Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium

Myriah Williams writes:

Established in 1996, the Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium celebrated its 20^th meeting on May 16^th at Jesus College, Oxford.  A postgraduate conference, the Colloquium is intended to foster ties between Celticists at these two institutions, and it provides an atmosphere in which budding academics may feel at ease presenting their work, perhaps for the first time.  There were an especially large number of Celticists in Oxford this year, as the O’Donnell Lecture had been held the day before, May 15^th, in the St Cross Building.  The lecture, titled ‘Between Ogam and Runes: the so-called Alphabet of Nemnivus’, was presented by Prof Paul Russell of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

Celticists relaxing, Jesus College, Oxford

Having enjoyed the festivities of the O’Donnell Lecture the previous evening, the contingent for the Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium was primed for a day of papers and discussion.  The speakers, four each from Cambridge and Oxford, were spread across three sessions.  The first was devoted to topics of Welsh interest, and included papers from Catrin Williams (Oxford), Rebecca Thomas (Cambridge) and Ben Guy (Cambridge).  Following lunch in the hall of Jesus College, the focus was shifted to Irish subjects in the second session, with talks from Kristyna Syrova (Oxford), Sara Lackner (Cambridge) and Harold Flohr (Cambridge).  The third and final session saw a return to Wales, with Angela Grant (Oxford) and Sarah Ward (Oxford) presenting.  As a special treat, Prof Thomas Charles-Edwards lead a small tour through the Fellows’ Library, where we saw a selection of books including Plummer’s editions of Annals and Saints’ Lives, an Irish primer and a Breton phrase book.  The day was concluded with a lovely dinner in the Mansell Room of the College.

Professor Charles-Edwards leads a tour of the Fellows' Library

Letter to Demetrias (British Academy Post-docs Part II)

Following on from our news of Dr Paul Gazzoli's British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship to work on the Life of Anskar, we also wish to congratulate another ASNC, Dr Alison Bonner, who has also been awarded a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship. Ali will be departing for Oxford University, where she will be working on Pelagius' Letter to Demetrias, and she outlines her project here:

My research project is to create a critical edition of a work by the first known British author, Pelagius, famous for his defence of human free will; in his Letter to Demetrias he made a comprehensive case for human free will. Pelagius was excommunicated in 418 AD because of his statements that human nature was inherently good and that human free will was a necessary component in God’s justice. Pelagius’ Letter to Demetrias occupies a special position in his surviving canon because it can be securely attributed to him, and also because it presents a summation of his thought written at a crucial time in his career, when he was aware that he was under attack for maintaining that the principle of free will was integral to the Christian message of salvation. No critical edition, based on a wide comparison of manuscript copies, has ever been made of this Latin text; scholars have had to use a text that was created from just a few manuscripts, has no critical apparatus, and thus has no real authority. As a result scholars have been unable to draw from the letter definitive conclusions about Pelagius’ thought or style. The large number of surviving copies testifies to the influence of Letter to Demetrias throughout the Middle Ages. A critical edition will present the data on the number of surviving witnesses to this text. I will also seek to ascertain whether or not Pelagius was read more widely in Britain than elsewhere in Europe.

More congratulations!

The awards and prizes are flooding in this month! Here are some more:

Dr Nick Zair, Research Fellow in Peterhouse and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge has been awarded the Johann-Kaspar Zeuss Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies of 2011. The title of his dissertation, which was completed in Oxford, is: ‘The reflexes of the proto-Indo-European laryngeals in Celtic’. The prize is awarded by the Societas Celtologica Europaea.

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Barraclough (ASNC) who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford.  Dr Barraclough will hold her fellowship in the Faculty of English, with an affiliation to The Queen’s College, and will be working on a research project mapping the literary landscape and conceptual geography of the medieval Norse world, with close readings of the sagas at the heart of the investigation. This literary analysis will be supported by an interdisciplinary methodology that explores the links between the sagas’ literary designs and the geographical conditions, historical reality, socio-political conditions and cultural memories underpinning Norse society.

Woruldhord Project at Oxford University

Anna Caughey writes:

On behalf of Dr Stuart Lee and the Oxford University Faculty of English, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Woruldhord Project, which opened on the 1st of July 2010 and is now receiving submissions.

The Woruldhord Project is a joint initiative of the Oxford University Computing Services and the Faculty of English. It aims to combine the expertise of literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, art historians and linguists together with material from museums, historical sites and members of the general public to create a comprehensive online archive of written, visual and audio-visual material related to Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period.

The Project is currently inviting contributions from anyone researching or teaching on the Anglo-Saxon period at a university level. We are particularly interested in images, audio/video recordings, handouts, essays, articles, presentations, spreadsheets, databases, course notes, lesson plans and materials used in undergraduate teaching, but welcome submissions of any type.

Any material submitted will be made freely available worldwide for educational purposes on the Project Woruldhord website, hosted by the University of Oxford. However, all intellectual property rights in the material will be retained by the contributor, contributors will be named on the site, and all visitors will be provided with a citation guide enabling them to properly acknowledge the authors of the resources. Contributors can also, if desired, attach links to their own or their University’s website to their contributions,
increasing their own web presence.

Timed to correspond with renewed public interest in the Anglo-Saxons following the recent discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, this project presents an excellent opportunity to apply computing technology to the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. It also aims to allow members of the public across the world to access rare or difficult-to-obtain material as well as the expertise of specialists in the field. We hope that academics and teachers are willing to share this material, especially if they feel it will be of benefit to the discipline. The Woruldhord Project follows on from the Great War Archive, a very successful project which
collected manuscript material, letters and other materials from the First World War from March-November 2008.

To submit material to the project, simply visit http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord. This page will take you through the simple-to-use submission process where you can upload your object and provide some basic information about it. Other pages that may be of interest include: the main website, the project blog, our 'help' section including a 'how to get started guide' and an FAQ, and a discussion group for the project

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email the project at: woruldhord@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Thanks in advance for any contributions you may send!