The Department is delighted to announce that Dr Becky Shercliff will be joining us as Assistant Professor of Celtic on 1st September 2026. Her appointment follows on from the election of Professor Máire Ní Mhaonaigh as the next Director of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies School of Celtic Studies from October 2026, an extremely prestigious 3-year role. Becky is currently Departmental Lecturer in Medieval Irish at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at Oxford, but is of course no stranger to Cambridge, having been a JRF at St John’s from 2019, after completing her PhD in ASNC. Becky’s dedication to accessible teaching is abundantly on show in her brand-new textbook Old Irish: A Beginner’s Guide, published by the Royal Irish Academy and already being taken up world-wide, and her research interests range across both medieval Irish and Welsh literature, from labours at the coal-face of textual editing to thinking in new ways about gender, emotion and speech in medieval literature. We look forward very much to welcoming her back into the ASNC fold.
