Hey, I was wondering if you might be able to offer some advice re: Ph.D.s in Irish Studies? (No worries if not! This is kind of a big ask...) I have a MSc in a different but tangentially related subject and I've been wanting to go back to school specifically for early Irish literature. Do you mind offering some insight into what programs are best for that sort of thing? What the benefits of a Ph.D. vs. a 'lower level' degree would be?
hey, sorry, i’m only an MA student so i don’t really know too much about PhDs, and i’m guessing from your spelling/word choices that you might be american? in which case the system is a bit different, PhD programmes over there tend to be longer and have more taught elements than over here (7 years vs 3 or 4 years), but i’m not too well-informed on the differences because i’ve no plans to go to the US for study
i guess if you wanted to do early irish material including language you’d need to make sure whatever programme you picked would allow you to do that ab initio (that is assuming you haven’t studied old irish before) -- i’m sure some PhD programmes would as it’s not like that many unis offer old irish but i would imagine some expect prior knowledge?? other than that it kind of depends how closely related your MSc is in terms of like. whether you’ve already developed the skills you’d need (things like palaeography and working with medieval texts) or whether you’d be starting from scratch, and what the prereqs would be for any programme you entered
also if funding applications etc would require you to already have a thesis/dissertation topic then that might be harder if you haven’t studied the subject before (and i imagine since there is so little funding in this field that it might be harder to get funding without a demonstrable background in it, but that is really pure speculation on my part)
anyway there aren’t a huge number of places that offer celtic studies but it really depends what country you’re in and like i said, i don’t really know a vast amount about the US (or, tbh, anywhere that isn’t the UK/Ireland). there are some long-established celtic programmes in north america (harvard & toronto among others) and also medievalists/celticists lurking within english or comp lit departments elsewhere... in ireland there’s ucc, maynooth, tcd; in the uk there’s asnac @ cambridge and oxford will maybe get its shit together now that they’ve got a chair of celtic again idk, also glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen offer celtic tho with a scottish emphasis (as you might expect) and some of the welsh unis likewise with a welsh emphasis (haven’t looked too much at those). there are various places in europe that also do it like utrecht, but i know even less about those
really i think with a PhD you’d need to know what you’d be aiming to research and then try and narrow down a supervisor who works on that stuff, but again, i’m only an MA student so i haven’t really gone through that whole process yet. sorry i can’t be more useful!
i guess the main advantage of an MA or something instead of going straight into a PhD is it’s a much smaller commitment, bc if you haven’t studied it formally before you may get a year into it and be like “oh this is enough actually, i don’t need to do this for another 5 years” or whatever -- there was this one academic i was talking to about my ideas who would have been a great fit for a supervisor but it would’ve meant skipping straight to PhD instead of doing a master’s first and i just wasn’t ready to commit to that, financially and emotionally (even tho my current supervisor keeps telling me my ideas are PhD-sized and need to be made smaller to suit a master’s lol)
