Areas of Research
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The Centre has led research into early Celtic linguistics as a result of several funded projects led by Professor John Koch since 1997. A recent four-year research project, ‘Rock art, Atlantic Europe, Words & Warriors’ (RAW), was funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). Fundamentally internationalist and multidisciplinary in its approach, it interpreted evidence gathered in Scandinavia, Wales, and the Iberian Peninsula, synthesising cutting-edge input in linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. John Koch is currently collaborating with colleagues at the University of Gothenburg on ‘Maritime Encounters’, which seeks to understand migration, mobility and exchange along the Atlantic façade from Norway to Iberia in Prehistory.
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One of the Centre’s core research areas is medieval Welsh literature. Since its establishment in 1985, the Centre has led the field in editing poetry texts, giving scholars standard editions which provide them with a solid foundation for the study of Welsh language and literature as well as related fields, such as history and social history. The outputs of the first two projects, the Poets of the Princes Series (7 volumes) and the Poetry of the Nobility Series (44 volumes), were published traditionally in print volumes; but since 2008 we have been publishing mainly in digital medium, creating innovative websites such as the Guto’r Glyn Website (2012), The Saints of Wales, and (in partnership with Cardiff University) The Poetry of Myrddin (2025). Recently we have also been editing prose texts, including the Lives of saints and texts relating the Laws of Hywel Dda.
In 2022, the Centre and the National Library of Wales published Dr Daniel Huws’s masterpiece, A Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes, c.800–c.1800. Staff at the Centre are now collaborating with experts in the field of Digital Humanities at Cambridge University to convert the Repertory into a format that will allow it to be offered as an online resource. This will also enable us to further develop the contents of the Repertory in the future, as new information about the manuscripts and scribes comes to light.
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Two AHRC-funded projects, which ran between 2013 and 2019, supported the publication of new editions of medieval literature, composed in both Welsh and Latin, about the saints of early Wales. The projects involved collaborations between CAWCS, the National Library of Wales, King’s College London and the University of Cambridge. Further AHRC funding was subsequently secured to develop a resource presenting information about the Welsh saints – including mapping where they were venerated and how they have been represented in visual art.
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Welsh place-names, and the Celtic names elsewhere in the British Isles, are an important strand in the Centre’s work. We have worked with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales to establish the List of Historic Place-Names of Wales, a statutory resource of Welsh Government. Dr David Parsons leads on historic place-name research and a project on Shropshire place-names led to the publication – amongst other outputs – of his Welsh and English in Medieval Oswestry (2022). Dr Angharad Fychan, Professor Ann Parry Owen and Gareth Bevan are members of the Welsh Language Commissioner’s Place-Names Standardisation Panel. They are also involved with the Welsh Place-Name Society, and are responsible for its website, bulletin and annual conference.
We are pursuing further research into other regions where Celtic languages have significantly shaped the modern map, including Herefordshire, Somerset and the Isles of Scilly.
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The Centre has pioneered important new research into the visual culture of Wales since 1994. The ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project, led by Peter Lord, published three printed and electronic volumes on the history of visual culture in Wales from the Early Middle Ages up to the 1960s. Subsequent projects include ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ (2005–8) and ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ (2009–11). Recent work has focused on the Stained Glass Archive in Swansea College of Art, led by Dr Martin Crampin. Other projects at the Centre have also researched elements of visual culture, including pre-historic Iberian warrior stelae and Scandinavian rock art; the iconography of saints in Wales; and imagery found in the eighteenth-century extra-illustrated volumes of Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales.
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Between 1700 and 1900 Wales underwent unimaginable changes. The legacies of those centuries – environmental, colonial, social and linguistic – shape our world today. CAWCS has played a leading role in supporting interdisciplinary work reflecting the entangled cultures and languages of the period. From in-depth explorations of individuals such as the flawed genius Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) to the range of voices responding to the French Revolution and the responses of British and European travellers to Wales, our research situates the lives and writings of Welsh people in national and international contexts.
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In 1921 the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies established a project to produce a standard historical dictionary of Welsh modelled on the Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty seven years were spent collecting evidence and the Dictionary was published in four volumes between 1950 and 2002. The project became a part of CAWCS in 2006 when the Board of Celtic Studies was disbanded and the team is now revising and augmenting the Dictionary thoroughly. A full online version was launched in 2014, which is freely available to the public, followed by apps for iOS and Android in 2016.
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Literary and Textual Translation has connected the Celtic languages with vernacular and written languages across the centuries. Translation is central to many of the Centre’s research projects.
Today this theme is led by Alexandra Büchler, Dr Elizabeth Edwards and Prof. Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones.
The Centre is home to Wales Literature Exchange and Literature Across Frontiers – strategic programmes connecting Wales and the world through contemporary literary translation and cultural exchange. Both are members of ENLIT and the City of Literature Campaigns for Aberystwyth-Ceredigion.
A specialist collection of Welsh literature in translations into over 40 languages is housed in the Centre Library.
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Celtic Studies is an inherently comparative discipline. Much of the work at the Centre examines Wales in its connections with other parts of the world, ranging from other Celtic cultures to large European neighbours such as France and Germany. Research that approaches Wales from international perspectives includes projects on travel writing, ports, sociolinguistics, and translation studies.
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We have expertise in contemporary language policy and planning in the context of European minoritised languages across a range of fields. This work also builds on the ground-breaking series The Social History of the Welsh Language.
BRO: A comprehensive sociolinguistic survey of contemporary Welsh-speaking communities, in collaboration with the University of the Highlands and Island, Jesus College Oxford and with the support of the Welsh Government.
Etxepare Basque Institute Alan R King Chair in Sociolinguistics
Collaborative Research Network: Bilingual Education and the Welsh Language, bringing together researchers from all Welsh universities and internationally.
Plurilingmedia: Language Plurality in Europe’s Changing Media Sphere. European Cooperation in Science and Technology (E-COST)
FOSTERLANG: Reversing the diversity crisis: inclusive strategies to foster the linguistic capital of Europe, funded by Horizon Europe.
The International Conference on Minority Languages
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The Centre is responsible for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography in partnership with the National Library of Wales.