Celtic Scholars Find Home at Harvard

Harvard faced a Celtic invasion last weekend as scholars from across the country and Europe attended the 23rd annual Celtic Colloquium hosted by the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures.

Harvard is home to the only graduate program in Celtic studies in the nation, and its reputation is excellent even across the Atlantic in the Celtic countries of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

“Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is a world figure in his field,” says Colloquium presenter Marion Deane of the University of Ulster, in reference to Harvard’s Shattuck professor of Irish studies. “The fact that he is here stimulated me to come here.”

Harvard has had a separate Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures since 1940, and courses in the Celtic field have been offered since 1896.

According to Department Chair Patrick K. Ford, who is also the Robinson professor of Celtic languages and literatures, Harvard’s department is “tremendously strong,” due in large part to the University’s collections.

Harvard boasts vast Celtic resources, including over 10,000 books and many original manuscripts, making it a necessary destination for those interested in Celtic studies.

“Our Celtic collection is one of the best in the world,” Ford says. “Scholars come from Dublin, Edinburgh or universities in Wales, and they just drool. It’s an astonishing collection.”

Celtic studies is an interdisciplinary field which includes the study of the six existing Celtic languages—Cornish, Manx, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh—along with the traditional and modern literature, mythology, history, law, folklore and religious tradition of the Celtic countries.

As Harvard’s unique graduate program indicates, scholars solely dedicated to Celtic studies are often hard to come across in the United States.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, only about 175 academics and graduate students belong to the Celtic Studies Association of North America, and of those only 40 focus primarily on the field. Many others are first and foremost scholars of history, English literature, linguistics, anthropology or archaeology.

While student interest in Celtic courses at Harvard and elsewhere appears to be healthy and even growing, the department and budding programs at other American universities face great difficulty expanding due to this limited number of scholars and restricted resources.

Celtic Tide

Celtic programs are springing up at places like the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says Dorothy Africa, one of the Celtic Colloquium organizers.

“Celtic studies are experiencing a resurgence,” Africa says.

Students “flock” to Celtic courses at schools such as Berkeley and the University of Washington at Seattle, according to the Chronicle, lured at first by the prevalence of Celtic references in popular culture and the entertaining tales of violence, romance and adventure found in the Celtic tradition.

According to Ford, the University of Notre Dame just received “an enormous grant” to start an Irish language-based program, while schools such as UCLA and the Catholic University of America have resident Celticists but no official programs.

“There are many ‘concentrations in’ although not official ‘departments,’” Africa says.

She believes it is now easier to study Celtic topics because the humanities have become more interdisciplinary and inclusive.

“The humanities have collapsed inward.  It used to be there was a department of this and a department of that, but now there is a loosening of the old rigid department ties,” she says.

Deane says that seeing an increase in young Celtic scholars is heartening to people who have been in the field for years.

“There are so many young presenters [at the Colloquium], either studying here or immediately qualified. Just the youth, it’s very elevating to me,” Deane says.

The department at Harvard is small, with only two full faculty members, 14 graduate students and no undergraduate program.

In the United States only Berkeley offers an undergraduate major in Celtic studies.

Harvard undergraduates may however enroll in most of the department’s courses, and can petition to pursue Celtic Languages and Literatures as a Special Concentration.

Celtic 107, “Early Irish History” and Celtic 132, “Introduction to Modern Irish,” each have nine undergraduates enrolled this semester, while Celtic 114, “Early Irish Historical Tales,” has 13 students.

The department also offers Core courses that Ford says are consistently popular. When it was last offered in the spring of 2002, 173 students enrolled in Literature and Arts C-20, “The Hero of Irish Myth and Saga.”

Bettina Kimpton, a graduate student in the department who helps teach “Introduction to Modern Irish,” says many but not all students are attracted to the courses by familial ties to Celtic countries.

“Many have Irish heritage, but also they come because they want to learn a completely new language,” she says, describing her students as “highly motivated.”

Kimpton says most students are Folklore and Mythology concentrators who can choose Celtic as their specialization, along with a few English, comparative literature, history and linguistics concentrators interested in the subject.

The more advanced language classes such as “Old Irish,” in which students read texts dating from the 8th and 9th centuries, however, tend to be reserved for graduate students.

Those pursuing advanced degrees in Celtic studies tend to choose Harvard for “the very distinguished faculty,” according to Ph.D. candidate Matthew Knight, another Celtic Colloquium organizer.

“We have students from Australia, Canada, Celtic countries, attracted by [Harvard’s] long-standing reputation,” he says.

Also, Knight says many Americans choose to study at Harvard because it is very difficult to obtain funding to study in foreign universities.

Celtic Constraints

Despite burgeoning interest at Harvard and across the country, increasing course offerings and fostering the development of programs into actual Celtic departments remains a difficult and complicated task.

“The interest is certainly there, but you have a roadblock because it takes so long to acquire expertise,” Africa notes. “There’s a gap between burgeoning interest and available faculty.”

Harvard’s department has experienced difficulty expanding due to the small number of placements available in the field, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of stagnancy.

“We try to admit two new students every year,” Ford says, although the department receives about seven times as many applications.

He also says it would be “pointless” at this time to try to increase the size of its graduate population, since there are simply not enough spots in academia for Celtic specialists. Though the department currently is “very successful in placing [students] in Scotland, Ireland and Wales,” if more were to be added to the pipeline, there would be no way to guarantee them positions after graduation. “There are not that many places for our Ph.D.s to go,” he says.

The interdisciplinary nature of most Celtic studies programs also limits the stability of jobs in the field.

“There aren’t other departments across the country, just those teaching in linguistics, history or comp lit departments. If the Celtic person leaves, there is no guarantee that [the department] will re-hire another Celticist,” he says.

“We’d love to see Celtic studies expanding throughout the country, but there’s not really so much we can do [as a department],” Ford says.

He says he believes the best way to increase the number of Celtic courses and departments is to continue to try to attract new and younger recruits.

“We’ve been trying to increase interest in the subject.  There’s general interest in the country, due to the publication of books such as How the Irish Saved Civilization,” he says.

Since 1994, Ford has taught seminars on Celtic studies to high school teachers from across the country in order to promote the field to younger students.

“We try to help them get their courses up to par. They come from all types of schools, we try for great diversity,” he says, adding that teachers from a broad range of schools have responded very positively to incorporating Celtic subjects into their curricula.

“My hope is their students will go to college and ask for the [Celtic] courses, demand them,” Ford says. “I’m hoping for a grass-roots swell of interest.”

Obstacles to creating strong departments present themselves in the Celtic countries as well in the U.S.

Deane says that Celtic studies are “not so popular” at the University of Ulster where she teaches, since it is difficult to attract loyalty the way other single-discipline departments can.

“It’s a cross-discipline, mixing medieval history, linguistics, literature. You don’t have the same melding together as you have in English departments,” Deane says.

Still, she, like Ford, is positive about the potential of events like the Celtic Colloquium and growing student interest to promote the expansion of Celtic studies at institutions of higher education.

“There is a familial camaraderie, a sense of belonging to a chosen group that at the same time has a great deal of scope,” she says, noting that she hopes this close-knit yet diverse atmosphere will continue to attract students to join the field in the future.

—Staff writer Margaretta E. Homsey can be reached at homesy@fas.harvard.edu.