Dr Rebecca Shercliff studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at St John's College, Cambridge. Her PhD thesis was a critical edition and translation of the medieval Irish tale Tochmarc Ferbe (The Wooing of Ferb), with textual notes and literary commentary. This received the 2019 Johann-Kaspar-Zeuss Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies, and has resulted in several publications. Her undergraduate dissertation on the medieval Irish tale Finn and the Man in the Tree and her MPhil dissertation on the role of King Arthur in the medieval Welsh text Trioedd Ynys Prydain (The Triads of the Island of Britain) have also been published. She has also worked on a number of digital humanities research projects, aimed at providing online teaching materials for medieval Irish.
Dr Shercliff provides teaching for the medieval Irish language and literature paper in the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos. She also supervises topics from Old English and Medieval Welsh literature and textual criticism. She runs the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic first-year grammar induction course and provides additional language support in a range of languages.
Her research centres on medieval texts and their development in the context of their social, historical and literary background, with a particular focus on producing new editions and translations of previously neglected works. She is currently editing and translating multiple versions of the medieval Irish text Tochmarc Ferbe (The Wooing of Ferb). Her main research interests are medieval Irish literature, early Arthurian literature and the role of medieval women. She is also interested in the pedagogy of medieval languages and is currently writing an Old Irish textbook for beginners.
An Introduction to Old Irish: A Companion to Quin’s Workbook and Strachan’s Paradigms (forthcoming: Royal Irish Academy).
‘The Evolution and Expansion of Tochmarc Ferbe’, in Tales & Transmission: Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Storytelling in Gaelic, ed. Alice Taylor-Griffiths and Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh (forthcoming: Boydell & Brewer).
‘The Narrative Unity of Finn and the Man in the Tree’, in The Gaelic Finn Tradition II, ed. Sharon J. Arbuthnot, Síle Ní Mhurchú and Geraldine Parsons (Four Courts Press, 2022), pp. 87-99.
‘Arthur in Trioedd Ynys Prydain’, in Arthur in the Celtic Languages, ed. Erich Poppe and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (University of Wales Press, 2019), pp. 173–86.
