Sean O Coilean

Last spring, Professor of Irish Studies Sean O Coilean was teaching at the National University of Ireland's College at Cork, introducing students to their country's native heritage. There, he says, "If you say you are in Irish Studies, no one asks you why."

This fall, as a newly arrived Harvard professor, O Coilean faces a different student body. "At the first class, you've got to take out a map of Ireland and show them where it is," he says.

Harvard's "unrivalled" library and research facilities in his field lured the Cork native across the Atlantic. The University owns most of the important manuscripts of Irish literature, and will acquire all of them eventually, he explains.

"I am able to fulfill my interests here better than elsewhere," says O Coilean, whose name translates in English as John Collins.

Harvard is also the only school in North America which awards doctoral degrees in Celtic Studies. "Other schools are just beginning to smuggle Celtic Studies into their programs under the guise of English," he adds.

Harvard's Celtic Department consists of O Coilean, the new chairman, one associate professor, a handful of graduate student concentrators, and about 100 course offerings.

By coincidence, both Charles W. Dunn and John V. Kellecher, the two professors of Irish Studies who comprised the department's tenured faculty last year, retired this fall.

Despite the relatively obscure status of Irish Studies in America, O Coilean has big plans for his department and for the field in general.

He aims to attract students--especially undergraduates--by broadening the field to include more students of medievalism, comparative literature and anthropology.

"The word "Celtic" is a real problem. I don't believe there is a Celtic so much as an Irish tradition. 'Celtic' makes the topic seem very remote and isolated, while Irish, Scottish or Welsh relate more personally to someone who might be flipping through a course catalogue, O Coilean says, "'Celtic' relates more to a basketball team."

"It's not that hundreds of students arrive and are turned away after the first lecture. People see the word 'Celtic' and don't see how the subject could be relevant to them."

In the department, most classes have an average of 10 to 12 students present, with approximately six students taking the class for credit.

O Coilean's own field is Irish folklore, linguistics, history and literature--which fits in well with the American emphasis on historical linguistics, as opposed to the Irish emphasis on the literature alone.

He spent his graduate years using historical and literary sources to examine the "legendary cycle" of a seventh--century Irish king named Guaire. As a student of the National University of Ireland, he was awarded a traveling studentship to research his topic around the country.

Before coming to Cambridge, O Coilean taught and studied at Cork--now, he works in a basement office in Widener Library that he shares with Kelleber, eleventh on a waiting list to get his own Widener office.

"Back home, having my own office was considered normal protocol," he says, "But now, barring a bed case of Asian flu, I won't get one this side of 1990."

Although O Coilean did two years of his graduate work at Harvard, he has not returned to America since 1971. Arriving now with his wife and four children in June. O Coilean says that in addition to the immediate problems of learning to drive a car on the right side of the road and the like, he faces more long-term conflicts.

He cites the difficult decision of whether to raise his children as Irish or American. "Coming from a country where emigration is so prominent makes it more difficult, paradoxically," he says, since depopulation is becoming a problem in his homeland.

Even so, he says, "You've got to be very sure of yourself to pursue these studies in the United States."

Especially with those unusual American customs. "I like hockey. It suits the Irish temperament," O Coilean says. But, he adds, "I don't like American football. And baseball could be gotten over with a lot more quickly."