PhD Celtic Studies

The subject has a high income stream, and staff and student support arrangements and postgraduate training are excellent. The Institute is committed to fully supporting its postgraduate students. Specialisms include medieval Irish language and literature, textual scholarship, the transmission of senchas and historical verse, voyage literature, the Gaelic manuscript tradition, bardic poetry, place-names research, dialectology, lexicography, minority languages, language policy and planning, contact linguistics and language change, sociolinguistics, the syntax and semantics of the verb in Irish, modern and contemporary Irish literature, creative writing, Gaelic literature in translation, applied language studies (CALL, digitization, language corpora) and Irish folklore, oral tradition and heritage studies.

The main objective of the Celtic Studies team is to foster and develop a vibrant research culture and ethos in all aspects of its work. This is reflected in a variety of ways, such as the number of high-quality publications by members of the group, externally-funded research projects, the organization of conferences and colloquia, international collaborations, and the large number of PhD Researchers and research degrees awarded.

PhD graduates are recognised by employers to hold valuable transferrable skills, as the nature of the degree trains candidates in creativity, critical inquiry, problem solving, negotiation skills, professionalism and confidence. The most recent Ulster survey of PhD graduates found that 92% had secured employment within the first year since graduation (HESA Destination of Leavers Survey 2015), and while two thirds end up in the Higher Education or Research sectors, the range of skills acquired equips the remainder for employment in a wide range of contexts.