Brigid Ehrmantraut, (Mar. 31, 2025)I completed both the MPhil and PhD in ASNC between 2018–2023. My degrees in ASNC prepared me very well for a career in academia; I am currently a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and my first monograph will be published in autumn 2025. My supervisors in ASNC were exceptional and remain valued colleagues. The department consistently provided chances for academic collaboration and teaching experience, as well as opportunities to organize and present at conferences and funding for travel, research, and modern language training. Access to libraries and other research resources in Cambridge is unparallelled (and was fantastic even during the pandemic!). The ASNC department is wonderfully interdisciplinary and contains a wealth of expertise in medieval languages, literature, history, and material culture. The department also offers training in core medievalist skills including languages, paleography, textual criticism, and historical linguistics which can often be difficult to find elsewhere. ASNC is also a very sociable and welcoming environment! My peers were always supportive and encouraging of my work and their friendship added immensely to my experience in the department and to my development as a scholar.
Geraldine Parsons, (Jun. 5, 2023)I was a graduate student (MPhil and PhD) in ASNC in 2001–6 and I am constantly aware of the excellent basis for a career in academia that the Department offered me. Presenting at the graduate seminars (and at the annual symposium the graduates organise) was invaluable preparation for speaking at bigger conferences, and the experiences I had supervising and lecturing were similarly beneficial. Yet, the graduate provision far exceeded the chance for 'trial runs' of various kinds. The vibrant and friendly interdisciplinary culture of the Department and – above all else – the incredible care and attention my work received from my supervisor, made ASNC a stimulating, supportive and rewarding place in which to be a graduate student. On submitting my PhD in 2005 I was fortunate to be appointed as Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, for four years, but then in 2008 the chance of a permanent post came along, so I took up my position as Lecturer in Celtic in the Department of Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow.
Flora Spiegel, (Mar. 1, 2010)Attracted by the international reputation of the Cambridge ASNC department, I arrived to begin an MPhil, expecting all of the usual Oxbridge stereotypes: aloof professors, hidebound tradition and crushing pressure. Instead I was welcomed into an academic community that felt like a family, from the sprawling departmental pub nights at the Castle to the supervisor who treated me like a daughter. The academic standard was, of course, of the highest order: I was privileged to learn from teachers who were not only at the very top of their fields, but also infinitely generous with their time, expertise and enthusiasm. From them I acquired the core skills that would later allow me to excel as an editor: the art of advanced research, the ability to organise information and write with precision, and a deep understanding of how languages work. When I decided to pursue a career in publishing (with Thames and Hudson, based in London) after completing my PhD, the department could not have been more supportive. Years later, I am constantly aware of how much my time in ASNC has enriched my life, professionally and otherwise. If an author misuses a Latin epithet, I can quietly correct it, and as I walk through the streets of frantic 21st-century London, I know what's under them.