A very warm welcome to Prof. Brent Miles, our new Professor in medieval Celtic languages and literatures at CMS and St. Michael’s College! Brent Miles researches principally the vernacular literatures of medieval Ireland and Wales, though he has a strong secondary interest in Hiberno- and Anglo-Latin. The bulk of his published work to date has concerned the study of ancient pagan poetry and mythology in medieval Ireland and the relationship of this classical learning to the native corpus of heroic narrative in Irish; a monograph on this subject, Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2011. Miles is currently directing his research into two new areas: the literature of kingship in Irish and Hiberno-Latin; and medieval Welsh political prophecy and the English appropriation of Welsh legendary history in the First English Empire. In addition to teaching in Celtic culture and history, Miles Old and Middle Irish and Middle Welsh, and maintains particular teaching interests in the Welsh and Anglo-Norman Arthur, and the Celtic revival in modern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Before joining the University of Toronto Brent was a Visiting Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Prior to taking up that position, he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at University College, Cork, and conducted research as a visiting scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Brent received his PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies!