Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 3: 1983

by John T. Koch (Editor)

The Harvard Celtic Colloquium was established in 1980 by two graduate students in the Harvard University Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures as a forum in which graduate students could share their work and gain experience in professional academia. Since then, it has been organized annually by a team of students in the department, grown in size, and gained an international reputation which annually draws a diverse mix of scholars from around the world to present papers on all facets of Celtic Studies.

The Harvard Celtic Colloquium is the only conference in the field of Celtic Studies to be wholly organized and run by graduate students. Since its inception, established and internationally-renowned scholars in Celtic as well as graduate students, junior academics, and unaffiliated scholars have been drawn to this dynamic setting, presenting papers on ancient, medieval, and modern topics in the many disciplines relating to Celtic Studies; including literature, linguistics, art, archeology, government, economics, music, and history.

Papers given at the Colloquium may be submitted for review to the organizers of the conference, who become the editors for those papers selected for publication in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Only papers presented at the annual conference are considered for publication.

Harvard University Press is proud to announce that we will distribute the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

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First published November 1, 2006

About the author

John T. Koch is an American academic, historian and linguist who specializes in Celtic studies, especially prehistory and the early Middle Ages.

He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was awarded the degrees of A.M. and Ph.D. in Celtic Languages and Literatures in 1983 and 1985 respectively. In addition, he has also pursued studies at Jesus College, Oxford, and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has taught Celtic Studies at Harvard University and Boston College.

Since 1998, he has been senior research fellow or Reader at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales, where he has supervised a research project focusing on Celtic Languages and Cultural Identity. Two of the offshoots of this project are the five-volume Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia and An Atlas for Celtic Studies (2007).

He has published widely on aspects of early Irish and Welsh language, literature and history. His works include The Celtic Heroic Age (first published in 1994, 4th edition in 2003), in collaboration with John Carey; The Gododdin of Aneirin (1997), an edition, translation and discussion of the early Welsh poem Y Gododdin; and numerous articles published in books and journals. A grammar of Old Welsh and a book on the historical Taliesin are in the works.

In 2007, John Koch received a personal chair at the University of Wales.

Koch supervises (as Senior Fellow and Project Leader) the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone Project (Ireland, Armorica, and the Iberian Peninsula). In 2008, Koch gave the O'Donnell Lecture at Aberystwyth University titled People called Keltoi, the La Tène Style, and ancient Celtic languages: the threefold Celts in the light of geography. In 2009, Koch published a paper Tartessian: Celtic from the Southwest at the Dawn of History detailing how the Tartessian language may have been the earliest directly attested Celtic language with the Tartessian written script used in the inscriptions based on a version of a Phoenician script in use around 825 BC.