Dr Rebecca Shercliff
Junior Research Fellow, St John's College
Departmental and College Responsibilities
I am a Research Fellow at St John's College, and a Director of Studies for Jesus and St Edmund's Colleges. I provide teaching for the Medieval Irish language and literature papers, and also supervise topics from Old English and Medieval Welsh literature, and Textual Criticism. I run the first year grammar induction course and am always happy to provide additional language support for any student who needs it.
Academic Interests
My research centres on medieval texts and their development in the context of their social, historical and literary background, with a particular focus on producing new editions and translations of previously neglected works. I am currently editing and translating the medieval Irish text Tochmarc Ferbe (‘The Wooing of Ferb’). My main research interests are medieval Irish literature, early Arthurian literature and the role of medieval women. I am also interested in the pedagogy of medieval languages and am currently writing an Old Irish textbook for beginners. I have been involved in a number of digital humanities projects aimed at providing educational resources online.
Selected Publications
‘A Translation of Finn and the Man in the Tree’, in A Reader in Fíanaigecht Literature, ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy and Natasha Sumner (forthcoming).
An Introduction to Old Irish: A Companion to Quin’s Workbook and Strachan’s Paradigms (forthcoming: Royal Irish Academy).
‘The Evolution and Expansion of Tochmarc Ferbe’, in Tales & Transmission: Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Storytelling in Gaelic, ed. Alice Taylor-Griffiths and Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh (forthcoming: Boydell & Brewer).
Grammar for Medieval Languages: An Introduction (forthcoming: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic).
‘The Narrative Unity of Finn and the Man in the Tree’, in The Gaelic Finn Tradition II, ed. Sharon J. Arbuthnot, Síle Ní Mhurchú and Geraldine Parsons (Four Courts Press, 2022), pp. 87–99.
‘Arthur in Trioedd Ynys Prydain’, in Arthur in the Celtic Languages, ed. Erich Poppe and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (University of Wales Press, 2019), pp. 173–86.
‘Textual Correspondences in Tochmarc Ferbe’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 35 (2016), 187–203.
Websites
‘The Many Lives of a Manuscript: the Southampton Psalter’: https://museums.cam.ac.uk/lookingatcollections/projects/southampton-psalter
‘Text and Meaning: the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language as Treasure-trove’: www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/schools/index.htm
‘eSenchas: An Electronic Resource for the Study of Medieval Irish Texts’: www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/esenchas/
