Biography

I teach, write, and speak about early modern and modern literature and folklore in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and English. Notable projects include:

• A monograph, Heroes of the Gael: A History of Fionn and the Fianna (Princeton University Press, 2026), which elucidates the historical development of Gaelic Fionn narrative -- that is, the immensely popular corpus concerning the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) and his roving warrior band, the Fianna. This narrative corpus encompasses a vast body of story and song, some of it well over a millennium old, extant in written literature and collected folklore.
• The Fionn Folklore Database (launched in 2023), which I direct, documents over 5,000 orally collected stories, lays, and other lore about Fionn and the Fianna, the best-loved heroes of the Gaelic world. The project has received grant support from Harvard University and the Government of Ireland.
• A co-edited volume, North American Gaels: Speech, Story, and Song in the Diaspora, published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2020. The volume is a groundbreaking exploration of the literature and folklore of North America's Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking diaspora since the eighteenth century. See here for more about this project and related past and forthcoming conferences and events. 
• New Irish and English subtitles for the first Irish-language sound film, Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling) (1935), which was re-discovered at Harvard. The film was directed by the great documentary film pioneer Robert Flaherty and restored by the Harvard Film Archive in 2015. It has since been broadcast on Irish national television. For more about this project see Folklore 116 (2015).