ASIMS is pleased to announce that the 2018 winner of the Terry Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies is Jesse Harrington for his paper for his paper “Betha Adomnáin as homily on Job.” He presented this talk at the 21st Biennial Symposium of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society, which was held at the University of Bristol in July 2018.

Dr. Harrington has just finished his Ph.D. in Medieval History (Corpus Christi College) at the University of Cambridge, under the primary direction of Dr. Carl Watkins and Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh; his dissertation title is “Vengeance and saintly cursing in the saints’ Lives of England and Ireland, c.1060–1215,” a work which was awarded the Griffiths Prize in Roman Studies for its examination of aspects of classical reception in the High Middle Ages. As its main subject matter, “Vengeance and saintly cursing” considered the theology and narrative representation of malediction and divine retribution in the hagiographical writings of the English Benedictines, of the English Cistercians, and of the Irish monastic communities (in particular Armagh, Ferns, Lorrha, Clonmacnoise, and Devenish) during the long twelfth century. Dr. Harrington also earned his M.A. degree from Corpus Christi College/Faculty of History at Cambridge, and his B.A. degree in History and Economics from University College Cork.

ASIMS is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2019 Four Courts Press Michael Adams Prize for best article or essay in Irish medieval studies is Dr. Amy Mulligan, for her article, “Poetry, sinew, and the Irish performance of lament: keening a hero’s body back together,” published in Philological Quarterly 97.4 (2018), 389-408. Dr. Mulligan wrote the article, in part, in memory of her mentor, Dr. Claire Sponsler, who served as professor at the University of Iowa.

Dr. Mulligan is Assistant Professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Irish Language and Literature, where the overarching goal of her research and teaching has been to put medieval Celtic literature into transnational contexts and to demonstrate how these texts inform and are informed by other North Atlantic literary, cultural, and political traditions. This work has been supported most recently by NEH and Fulbright US-UK fellowships. Her monograph, A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 (Manchester University Press, Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Series), has just been published, and she has also edited, with Else Mundal, the volume Moving Words: Literacies, Texts and Verbal Communities of the Nordic Middle Ages, forthcoming from Brepols in the fall of 2019.