Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh is a Graduate of the University of Galway (BA, MA) and the University of Cambridge (PhD). Prior to taking up a lectureship in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish, UCC, she was a post-doctoral Research Scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund’s College, the University of Cambridge.

Her research focuses on medieval literature, history and culture, and in particular on the interface between Latin and Irish-language textual traditions. In her study of the extant texts of medieval Ireland, she concentrates on the creative and fertile processes of genre appropriation, translation and adaptation.

Related to this work, she is a Board Member of the Apocrypha Hiberniae project which provides critical editions of Irish New Testament apocrypha in the prestigious Brepols Corpus Christianorum series. In addition, she is a member of the Editorial Board of Peritia: Journal of the Medieval Academy of Ireland, is on the Advisory Committee of the Roman journal Ephemerides Liturgicae, and is an Irish Humanities Alliance Board Member. She is also a Member of the Board of the Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources which oversees the work of the Dictionary team and provides expertise for draft entries. In 2016 she was awarded a visiting Fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. She has also for many years been an active member of Cumann Merriman and is now the secretary on the board of the society. 

Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh’s research focuses for the most part on the rich and varied extant texts of medieval Irish Christian culture, including poetry, prayers, litanies, hymns, hagiography, homilies, exempla and apocrypha. She has a particular expertise in the Irish reception of early Christian sources, and the manner in which Irish reworkings of such materials re-entered Continental scholarly circles. She employs a wide range of methodologies in the analysis of the source material combining the fields of philology, palaeography, comparative literature, literary criticism, source analysis, cultural studies, history of intellectual culture and history of thought. In recent years, she has enlarged her research interests to encompass the uses of the past in contemporary discourse with a particular emphasis on the framing of Ireland’s past in school curricula.          

Research Projects include:  

Ultonia Project
In 2022, she was awarded €199,991.75 by the HEA under the North-South Research Programme (Strand 1) for a project entitled: Ultonia - Cultural Dynamics in medieval Ulster and beyond: a shared inheritance (see Ultonia - Cultural Dynamics in medieval Ulster and beyond: a shared inheritance | University College Cork (ucc.ie). This two-year project, in collaboration with Dr Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil of the University of Ulster, Magee Campus, aims to research Irish culture in the early medieval period to highlight this shared pre-reformation heritage. This is a radical departure as narratives of the past will be leveraged to interrogate contemporary concepts of identity. The output of the team will consist of academic publications by the lead investigators and post-doctoral researcher, and crucially a range of educational resources for secondary schools both North and South.  

Apocrypha Hiberniae
This prestigious international project, ongoing since 1988, was initiated to facilitate the publication of Irish and Hiberno-Latin versions of Biblical apocrypha in the leading international series Corpus Christianorum (Brepols, Belgium). The Irish editorial board was established to collaborate with the umbrella research group AELAC (Association pour l'étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne), based in Lausanne, Geneva, and Paris (see https://wp.unil.ch/aelac/). In 2015, after contributing on the project for a number of years, she was asked to join the Editorial Board.  

De Finibus: Christian Representations of the Afterlife in Medieval Ireland
From 2009, she was joint PI for this project (https://www.ucc.ie/en/definibus/) which attracted €217,091 in funding from the IRC and which came to a close in December 2014 with the publication of The End and Beyond: Christian Representations of the Afterlife in Medieval Ireland, a two-volume collection of 42 edited texts and essays produced by 13 contributors, edited in conjunction with John Carey and Emma Nic Cárthaigh. 

Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh's teaching encompasses a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules. These modules are divided between two undergraduate subject areas, Celtic Civilisation and Gaeilge, and four MA programmes. The modules are offered across 10 undergraduate degree programmes in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences. In addition, she is the programme director for the MA The Beginnings of Irish Christianity.
https://www.ucc.ie/en/cke19/

The modules she both co-ordinates and teaches include:
CC1111 The Ancient Celts
CC2007 The Celtic Languages
CC2011 Gender, Image and Identity in Medieval Ireland
CC3013 Medieval Manuscript Culture
GA2032 Litríocht na Sean-Ghaeilge
CC6003 Early Irish Text
CC6008 Palaeography and Manuscript-based Research