Queen's University Belfast

Faculty Member, Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts

Thesis Title: A study of a selection of topographical elements in Irish place-names

About

Born, raised and schooled in England, I have lived in Ireland, south and north, since 1990.  Having a background in Modern Languages, I took a side-step into Irish Studies, undertaking a part-time Masters at QUB (2001-04).  My MA dissertation dealt with some common elements in Irish mountain names, a topic which allowed me to combine passions for the landscape and for language.  Subsequently worked as a Research Assistant at the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project on a project providing Irish forms of street-names.
My thesis built on the MA dissertation, exploring a group of elements which are known chiefly from Irish place-names and whose meaning and/or origin is obscure: trosc, collann, mala, málainn, carbad, fothair, mionnán, glinsc. I applied a similar methodology to that used successfully in England by Margaret Gelling to refine the meanings of elements found in names of landscape features. I also examined the etymology of these elements in order to understand their links with other languages, both Celtic and non-Celtic.  I assisted my supervisor, Mícheál Ó Mainnín, to organise a conference on early place-names in Ireland and Scotland in September 2008, and I organised a second conference in the series in November 2009 with a number of other research students based in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England: Kelly Kilpatrick (Wadham College, Oxford), Liam Ó hAisibéil (NUI Galway), Peter McNiven (Glasgow) & Judyta Szacillo (QUB).  The 2nd International Conference on the Early Medieval Toponymy of Ireland and Scotland was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Queen's University Belfast.  http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLanguagesLiteraturesandPerformingArts/Conferences/ConferencesForthcoming/  I am currently working part-time at the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project, maintaining and editing the online database: http://www.placenamesni.org  A series of my articles on place-names in Irish mountain areas is being published by the magazine Walking World Ireland.
Research interests: Irish and British hill and mountain names; Topographical names on early maps of Ireland and regions of Ireland (mainly 16th and 17th century); Close compound place-names in Irish and other Celtic languages; Kerry place-names; Street-names and Road-names; Irish etymology.