Postdoctoral Researcher (Specified Purpose Contract / 0.9 FTE) Department of Early Irish (School of Celtic Studies), Maynooth University

Maynooth University is committed to a strategy in which the primary University goals of excellent research and scholarship and outstanding education are interlinked and equally valued. 

We are seeking an experienced postdoctoral researcher for the research project DiAgnostic – Tracing Diatopic Variation in a Corpus of Old Irish. This project is conducted with the financial support of an Advanced Laureate Award from Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland under Grant number IRCLA/2023/ 2124 and is led by Professor David Stifter. DiAgnostic aims at making methodological progress in trying to answer the question if the Early Irish language, especially in its Old Irish form, showed regional diversi­fication, i.e. dialects. We expect to make a significant contribution to the de­scription and the under­stand­ing of the development of the Early Irish language and of its socio­his­to­rical context, including implica­tions for its prehistory. Work is carried out primarily within the discipline of historical linguistics with a strong em­phasis on methods of digital humanities, but other aspects of linguistics such as syntactic theory, sociolinguistics, and the philology of Early Irish texts play a role as well.

The position of the postdoctoral researcher will involve adding data to the project database Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), in particular with regard to filling gaps among the major contemporaneous sources of Old Irish, as well as assisting in and contributing to other project deliverables.