Current Projects
Professor Koch has a key role in a major 4-year research project—Rock art, Atlantic Europe, Words & Warriors (RAW)—funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). This ambitious project is fundamentally internationalist and multidisciplinary in its approach. It is interpreting evidence gathered in Scandinavia, Wales, and the Iberian Peninsula, synthesising cutting-edge input in linguistics, archaeology, and genetics.
This four year project – ‘Ports, Pasts and Present: Cultural Crossings between Ireland and Wales’ – is a joint initiative with University College Cork (UCC) and Wexford County Council in Ireland, and in Wales with Aberystwyth University and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The project is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Ireland Wales Cooperation programme and is led by UCC.
In partnership with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the Department of Digital Humanities at KCL and the National Library of Wales, the project will produce bilingual online editions of all the texts relating to the saints, and aims to promote both local and international interests in this key aspect of Wales's cultural heritage.
This will become a web-based electronic resource within the University’s ‘Global Campus’. Provisionally entitled the ‘Guide to Welsh Name-Studies’, it will offer rather more than a conventional printed bibliography, because it will contain full summaries of many articles, and electronic indexes to longer studies; in addition, all the entries will have been tagged according to the subject-matter and region with which they are concerned.
In 1921 the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies established a project to produce a standard historical dictionary of Welsh modeled 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 the responsibility 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.
As part of a major AHRC-funded project to complete work on the English Place-Name Society’s survey of Shropshire’s place-names, we shall be preparing a study of the Welsh names of the county. We will devote a substantial volume to the two hundreds of Clun, in the south-west, and Oswestry, in the north-west, where the Welsh language has contributed extensively to local toponymy.