Deborah Hayden is Professor in Medieval Irish and Celtic Studies in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth. Her research interests and teaching centre on medieval Irish, Latin and Welsh language, literature and textual culture, in particular the history of education and linguistic thought in classical and medieval tradition; premodern Irish medical writing and its wider European context; early Irish lexicography; Irish and Welsh legal tradition; and translation literature. She is currently Principal Investigator of the 4-year digital humanities project LEIGHEAS: Language, Education and Medical Learning in the Premodern Gaelic World, funded by a Consolidator Laureate Award from Research Ireland, and Co-Investigator of the digital humanities projects OG(H)AM: Harnessing Digital Technologies to Transform Understanding of Ogham Writing, from the 4^th Century to the 21^st and Ogham Palaeography+.

Dr Michael Potterton’s core field of research is the history and archaeology of medieval Ireland, with special reference to landscape and settlement – urban, rural and hinterlands. He has established an international reputation as an innovative researcher, a dynamic teacher and an accomplished writer and editor. He has published thirteen books (as author, co-author or co-editor), presented cutting-edge research in nine countries, received fifteen competitively awarded scholarships and grants and organised a dozen fully booked conferences. He has designed, coordinated, taught and examined over twenty different undergraduate and postgraduate courses at five universities in three countries (MU, NUIG, UCD, Sorbonne, University of Toronto). He has also given guest lectures at QUB, TCD, the University of Wales at Lampeter, Lancaster University, East Carolina University, Appalachian State University and Wellington College (UK)…

My research focuses on the replication of sculpture (especially Early Medieval high crosses) in both physical and digital form. It looks at historical efforts to replicate Irish artworks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these became symbols of modern Irish identity, while also drawing parallels between this historic replication and modern digital technologies such as laser scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing. I am also interested in the archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland, collections management and the history of museums, and heritage education and outreach.

I have been a lecturer in Early Irish at Maynooth University since 2013, and served as Head of Department from 2015-2020. I am currently Visiting Senior Fellow in Humanities at the University of Suffolk, UK (2024-7), and Doohan Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia (2025). I am currently serving as an elected member of the Governing Authority of Maynooth University, and I am an executive board member…

Professor Karen Desmond’s research as a historical and digital musicologist delves into the aesthetics, theories, and technologies (including the technology of the book) that underpinned medieval music-making. She is currently the Principal Investigator for a 2-million-euro ERC-funded project titled BROKENSONG that examines polyphonic singing and written culture in late medieval Britain and Ireland. She is an international expert on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, music notation, and music theory, and welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral and postdoctoral applicants interested in working with her on medieval music topics.

I am the author or editor of ten books and over forty other substantive writings including articles, reviews and dictionary entries, with a further four books forthcoming and a number of articles accepted for publication.  My work has been published in Ireland, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and has been translated into Portuguese and Chinese…

Chantal Kobel received a degree in Early and Modern Irish and a PhD in Early Irish from Trinity College Dublin. She also completed a Masters in Archives and Records Management (UCD). She has held positions as an O’Donovan Scholar and a Bergin Fellow in the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research centres on Old and Middle Irish language and literature, Irish palaeography and codicology. She has published a range of articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes and conference proceedings.

Dr Eric Nemarich is a postdoctoral researcher and historian at Maynooth University, where he is affiliated with the ERC-funded project BROKENSONG under the direction of Prof. Karen Desmond (Music). Eric studies the formation of professional communities in the cities of later medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. He holds a PhD in History from Harvard University, where he defended his thesis, ‘Zealots of Justice: Coercive Officials in Late Medieval Italy’, in August 2024. His work on composers of polyphony (organistae) in thirteenth-century Paris recently appeared in the journal Speculum. He also collaborates with the ‘Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe’, a project at Harvard University.

My research interests lie in Old and Middle Irish language and philology and on the Continental Celtic languages (Celtiberian, Gaulish and Lepontic), in particular language variation and change in Old Irish, Early Irish literature, comparative Celtic lin­guistics, and the development and application of Digital Humanities resources for these languages. My handbook Sen­goídelc. Old Irish for Beginners (Syracuse University Press 2006) is a popular introduction to Old Irish. My previous projects include the FWF-funded projects Milan Glosses (2006–2011) and Lexicon Leponticum (2009-2011), and the ERC Consolidator Grant project Chronologicon Hibernicum (2015–2021). I am currently PI of the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland-funded project OG(H)AM (2021–2025) and the Advanced Laureate project DiAgnostic (2023–2027).

Johanna-Pauline Thöne is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Consolidator Grant Project BROKENSONG, led by Professor Karen Desmond at Maynooth University. Johanna specialises in the analysis and reconstruction of fourteenth-century polyphony and received her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2024 with a thesis entitled ‘Papal Polyphony during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417): How Music Dedicated to Popes Absorbed and Reflected a Time of Crisis’. Her broader interests include fragmentology and digital reconstructions, palaeography, repertory transmission, philology, and the cultural history of the late Middle Ages.

Nora White is Principal Investigator on the Irish Research-funded Pathway Project: EMISoS (Early Medieval Irish Scripts on Stone). Her primary research areas are early Irish epigraphy, digital epigraphy and palaeography. Early Irish epigraphy includes the earliest inscriptions (mainly on stone monuments but also some portable objects of various material types) in the Irish language, in both ogham and Latin insular scripts, from the 5th to the 12^th century AD. She has increasingly been incorporating tools and methods from Digital Epigraphy and Digital Humanities generally, primarily digital encoding using XML (EpiDoc) and 3d imaging. Her research also utilises a multidisciplinary approach, which frequently involves collaboration with colleagues in related disciplines, such as archaeology.

My research focusses on Irish medieval ecclesiastical history from late antiquity (fifth century) until after the English conquest (twelfth century). I have previously published on the cult of relics and St Brigit. I am currently Principal Investigator of the Taighde Éireann Pathway project, ‘Power and patronage in medieval Ireland: Clonard from the sixth to twelfth centuries’. The project takes this one major centre situated in a strategic geopolitical position between the powerful dynasties of the Uí Néill in the northern half of Ireland and the Éoganacht in the south, and explores its history through lenses of political, religious and gender identity.

I am a palaeoecologist with a background in Archaeology. I have a keen interest in past vegetation, and landscape evolution. I am interested in perceived-marginal and upland cultural land-use, tracing the origins of present-day landscapes and defining sustainable economic practices by analysing long-term vegetation evolution. I have participated in multiple Palaeoenvironmental and Archaeological research projects in Portugal, Scotland and Ireland.

I came to Maynooth as an undergraduate mature student and completed my BA in Nua-Ghaeilge and Celtic Studies in 2013. I received a Maynooth University, John and Pat Hume Award to fund my PhD A Study of the Lexicon of the Poems of Blathmac, Son of Cú Brettan.  In 2014 I received Irish Research Council funding for the final 3 years of my PhD. In 2018 I was appointed Research Assistant on an Irish Research Council funded project supervised by Principal Investigator, Dr Deborah Hayden, Medieval Irish medicine in its north-western European context: a case study of two unpublished texts (MIMNEC). In 2020 I received Irish Research Council Postdoctoral funding for my project A triad of medical glossaries. In November 2022 I began working as Postdoctoral Researcher on the project LEIGHEAS: Language, Education and Medical Learning in the Premodern Gaelic World, along with Principal Investigator, Dr Deborah Hayden.

I am primarily interested in the representation of marginalised groups in the medieval world. My PhD thesis focuses on the depiction of physical impairment in medieval Irish learned literature. This shall consist of an overview of the portrayal of such impairments within a variety of different medieval Irish sources, including law codes, hagiographies, and saga literature. I intend for this thesis to be one of the first in-depth studies of physical impairment in relation to the medieval Irish written material. I hope it will help to bring the perspective of Disability Studies into the medieval Irish historical narrative, whilst also promoting the inclusion of the Irish material within the wider discipline of Medieval Studies.

My PhD research applies Descriptive Translation Studies to analyse the Early Modern Irish adaptations of the Middle English romances Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, exclusively preserved in TCD MS 1298 and translated by the prolific scribe Uilliam Mac an Leagha. As an affiliate of the LEIGHEAS project, I also engage with late-medieval Irish medical translations. My research interests draw on my academic background in the Celtic, Romance, and Germanic traditions and include literary and non-literary translations, literary history, historical linguistics, manuscript studies, and digital humanities, specifically digital editions and transcriptions.

My research focuses on the impact of dress, clothing and accessories in late medieval Ireland (c.1100–1550). This is based on a multidisciplinary approach that takes archaeological, historical and literary sources into account. By undertaking this research, I hope to delve into how dress could reinforce or subvert ideas of identity, including ethnicity, status and gender. This aligns with my broader research interests which encompass material culture, identity and cross-cultural contacts between Ireland and Europe in the medieval world.

My research is an expansion of my master’s degree dissertation, from a case study of three tales into a comprehensive study of the genre of Early Irish tochmarca or “Wooing” literature. I am analysing these tales for gendered patterns of politeness usage, with politeness ascribed a concrete real number value. Speech is analysed using a series of conditions which either adds or subtracts a pre-determined point value from the total politeness score. Using this formula and the generated total politeness score, the gendered politeness average of a tale will be determined and can then be compared to other tales both broadly by gender or circumstance, or narrowly by individual characters.

My research compares medieval Irish and Korean literature from a gender studies perspective. I investigate how institutions and religions impacted human gender and sexuality in medieval times by analysing and comparing medieval literature from both cultures, such as religious disciplinary texts and law texts. Furthermore, my study eventually explores how this phenomenon is pertinent to today’s world and overcomes geographical and cultural limitations in medieval studies.

I am currently working as a PhD student on the historical linguistics of Old Irish as part of the DiAgnostic (Tracing diatopic variation in a corpus of Old Irish) project helmed by Pr. David Stifter. The aim of the PhD is to design a model which could help us better assess and evaluate linguistic variations in Old Irish, namely by reviewing evaluation methodologies applied for other languages, historical and modern, Indo-European and beyond. Then, I will try-out this model on a selection of Old Irish texts or on (a) specific variation pattern(s).

As a PhD researcher, my current research is under the Early Medieval Irish Scripts on Stone (EMISoS) project, funded by Research Ireland. For my part of this project, I am delineating the progress of the Insular script, including the relationship between the script on stone and that in early manuscripts; investigating textual references to crafters in medieval Irish texts, including law-texts, Canon Law, and saints’ lives; and examining similar work from related fields, like Old English and art history. My past research includes late medieval Irish law texts, Middle Irish poetry, medieval Catholic theology, and medieval art history

Inês Nunes Trindade is a PhD student at Maynooth University, as part of Prof. Karen Desmond’s  ERC-funded project BROKENSONG. Her PhD Dissertation focuses in the unique Worcester Service Book from the 13th century. Inês specialises in Plainchant and Liturgical manuscripts with particular interest in the transmission of melodies, liturgical texts and musical notation, as well as the production of Medieval books.

My research aims to understand how women exercised power and authority in medieval Ireland by operating socio-cultural and political networks of patronage. This investigation is framed around noblewomen and religious women of the 12^th century due to its intense and transformative character, but it allows certain chronological flexibility in order to understand the development of the concept and exercise of female power. To fill this epistemological lacuna, I employ an interdisciplinary approach anchored in a wide array of sources such as the corpus of secular genealogies, the Banshenchas and annalistic evidence.