FAS Appoints Celtic Prof

The University announced this Wednesday that Catherine McKenna will join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) on July 1, 2005 as the Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures.

McKenna’s hiring comes as the current chair of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Patrick K. Ford, prepares to retire after this year.

“She is an outstanding scholar,” said Ford, who is Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures. “She has an international reputation, and I expect nothing but the best.”

McKenna earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. She returns here after spending her entire teaching career at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She has served as a professor of English and comparative literature at the school, and became the director of the Medieval Studies Certificate Program in 1980.

Though McKenna said she has enjoyed her time teaching English at CUNY, she said she decided to leave CUNY to pursue her passion: “My real love in research and teaching has always been in medieval Celtic literatures,” she said.

Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures is the only one of its kind in the nation.

McKenna will bring her expertise in Medieval Welsh and Irish literature to the department, which offers advanced training in six Celtic languages.

McKenna’s best known work deals with the court poets of 12th and 13th century Wales. Her translations and interpretations in The Medieval Welsh Religious Lyric have garnered much acclaim for granting English-speaking medievalists access to previously overlooked works.

“Catherine McKenna is a medieval scholar of great distinction, and the momentum evident in her work shows the promise of even greater things to come,” said Dean of FAS William C. Kirby in a press release.

McKenna said she plans to continue her research projects at Harvard. She is translating a seven-volume work of Welsh court poetry, which she was instrumental in assembling in 1994, and studying Saint Brigit, one of the patron saints of Ireland whose historicity remains a topic of debate.

The department—currently composed of three professors—administers programs leading to doctorates in Celtic languages and literatures.

In addition to teaching advanced classes in medieval Welsh languages to Ph.D. students, McKenna looks forward to teaching the department’s Core courses because she is “anxious to do undergraduate courses as well.”

The current Core class offered by the department is Literature and Arts A-68, “Poets and Poetry in the Celtic Literary Tradition.”