Celtic Pedagogies (Workshop)

Harbour Centre 2050

Organizer: Matthieu Boyd (Fairleigh Dickinson University)

The early literature in Celtic languages has been stereotyped as weird - colourful, exuberant, otherworldly, but also more or less nonsensical and cryptic. Not everyone has the specialist background to make it make sense. As texts like the Irish Táin bó Cúailnge and the Welsh Mabinogi become standard in classrooms across North America, this is a pressing issue – and an unprecedented opportunity. If you've been struggling to bring Celtic texts more fully into your teaching of traditional “Brit Lit,” or you're wondering why one would even do that, this workshop is for you. If you already work in Celtic Studies and have been missing the kind of conversation about teaching that we see in other areas - this workshop is for you. We’ll work closely with examples where a specialist understanding completely transforms the reading of a text, and open them up to all the other ways they might be read in the twenty-first century. Expect some hands-on interaction, not a lecture.

This workshop is led by Matthieu Boyd, a graduate and longtime associate of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (now chair of the Department of Literature, Language, Writing, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University), who has been translating Celtic texts for student audiences in association with Broadview Press.