Katherine Forsyth is Professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests lie in the history and culture of the Celtic-speaking peoples in the first millennium AD, with a particular focus on text as material culture. She has published on aspects of Pictish studies and on sculpture in Scotland, and on board-games in Celtic Britain and Ireland, but the main focus of her research is epigraphy, particularly inscriptions in the ogham alphabet. She has conducted field-work on inscriptions throughout Scotland, in south-west Ireland, south-west England, the Isle of Man and Brittany.
For many years a member (and Chair) of the National Committee for Carved Stones in Scotland, she is co-author of the Scottish Archaeological Framework Future Thinking on Carved Stones in Scotland. She is currently Co-Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Iona’s Namescapes: Placenames and their dynamics in Iona and its environs’ (2020-2023), and Director of the AHRC’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Celtic Languages.
UK Principal Investigator
Deborah Hayden is Associate Professor in Early Irish at Maynooth University. Her main research interests centre on medieval Irish, Latin and Welsh language, literature and textual culture, in particular the history of linguistic thought and education in classical and medieval tradition, premodern Irish medical writing and its wider European context, early Irish lexicography, Irish and Welsh legal sources, this history of cryptography, and translation literature.
From 2018–2021 she was Principal Investigator of the project Medieval Irish Medicine in its North-western European Context: a Case Study of Two Unpublished Texts (MIMNEC), funded by a Starting Laureate Award from the Irish Research Council, and from 2020–2021 she was Co-Investigator of the IRC/AHRC-funded UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Networking project Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World. She is currently Lead Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Language & History, published by Taylor & Francis.
Irish Co-Investigator
Megan Kasten holds a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Glasgow (2019), and her research interests lie in digital imaging and its applications in research, particularly in the study of early medieval carved stones and sculpture. In her PhD, she created photogrammetric records of the Govan Stones as a case study to explore a range of research applications, especially in identifying worn decoration and applying Groove Analysis to understand the ‘Govan School of Carving’. As a Research Assistant for SPARC (SPatial Archaeometry Research Collaborations), she has developed open-source teaching materials that introduce students to work with 3D data and emphasise the potential underlying archived 3D datasets for archaeological research and outreach. She has acted as digital imaging consultant for the CALC-Rome and the Glen Lyon project. She has also provided support for a range of projects, including the RSE funded projects the im/material network and MERC Manifesto.
UK Postdoctoral Researcher
Patricia O Connor completed a PhD in Digital Humanities at University College Cork in 2019. Her PhD involved encoding the palaeographical and codicological features and complex mise-en-page of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41 (CCCC41), a manuscript witness of the Old English Bede which contains an impressive range of additional Latin and Old English texts as well as a few runic sequences in its margins. Her research interests encompass Old English literature and language, medieval manuscript culture and the history of the book, encoding medieval texts according to the TEI standard of XML and the representation of marginalia in digital scholarly editions. Within the scope of the OG(H)AM project, Patricia encodes the ogham inscriptions in Epidoc TEI XML format.
Her previous postdoctoral work includes applying handwritten text recognition technology for the automatic segmentation and transcription of the fire damaged manuscript Turin, Biblioteca nazionale universitaria, MS L. II. 14 using eScriptorium for the RESCAPÉ and PRAIRIE projects at the École nationale des chartes (2022-4); encoding the literary and scientific correspondence of David Bailie Warden for the ‘Transatlantic Intellectual Networks’ project at the University of Newcastle (2022-3); and reviewing data and producing transcriptions of Old English and Anglo-Latin poetic texts for the ERC-funded project ‘A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ (CLASP) at the University of Oxford (2021-2022).
Irish Postdoctoral Researcher
David Stifter is Professor of Old and Middle Irish at Maynooth University Department of Early Irish. His research interest includes language variation and change in Old Irish, comparative Celtic linguistics (esp. Old Irish and Continental Celtic), and language contact in the ancient world and in the early medieval British Isles. He has published widely on the Old and Middle Irish language and literature, and on the Continental Celtic languages (Celtiberian, Gaulish and Lepontic). His introductory handbook Sengoídelc. Old Irish for Beginners (Syracuse University Press 2006) is used for teaching Old Irish in universities world-wide. In the OG(H)AM project, he studies the evidence of the ogam inscriptions for the development of the language from Primitive Irish to the individual Gaelic languages.
Prof. Stifter’s previous projects include the ERC-funded project ‘Chronologicon Hibernicum – A Probabilistic Chronological Framework for Dating Early Irish Language Developments and Literature’ (2015‒2021); the IRC-AHRC-funded UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities network Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World (2020‒2021); and the FWF-funded projects A Dictionary of the Old Irish Glosses in the Milan Manuscript Ambr. C301 infr. (2006‒2011;), Lexicon Leponticum (2009‒2011); and Old Celtic Language Remains in Austria (2008‒2011 ).
Irish Principal Investigator
Nora White holds a PhD in Early Irish (2006) from Maynooth University. She subsequently carried out postdoctoral work (2006-2009) as an O’Donovan Scholar in the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and as a research assistant on the IRC funded Monasticon Hibernicum project. From 2010 to 2015, she held the position of Principal Investigator on the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, funded (2012-2015) by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in collaboration with the National Monuments Service and the Discovery Programme. She returned to Maynooth University and the Department of Early Irish in 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher on the Chronologicon Hibernicum project funded by the European Research Council. In 2021, she was Co-Investigator (with PI Prof. David Stifter) on a project (EMILI, A Digital Corpus of Early Medieval Irish Latinate Inscriptions) funded by a RIA Nowlan Digitisation Grant.
Irish Postdoctoral Researcher
The OG(H)AM team has also been supported by a number of interns: Clara Scholz, Bodil Malmose, Molly McKendrick, Lucie Haase, Xenia Spanachi, and Morgan Livingstone.