Virginia Blankenhorn
Editor, Scottish Studies
- Celtic and Scottish Studies
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
Celtic and Scottish Studies
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Background
Born and raised in California, Dr Blankenhorn received her B.A. in music from Wellesley College (1969), her Master’s degree in Celtic Languages and Literature from Harvard University (1975), and her Ph.D. in Celtic Studies at the University of Edinburgh (1987), where her doctoral dissertation examined Irish accentual verse-practice.
From 1976–78, Dr Blankenhorn held a two-year scholarship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where she studied and wrote about intonation in the Irish of Connemara, Co. Galway. In 1978 she was appointed to a temporary lectureship at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh (1978-81), where she specialized in Scottish Gaelic poetry and song, and subsequently to a lectureship at the University of Ulster (1981-88), lecturing in Irish language, Scottish Gaelic language and literature, Irish folklore and traditional song, and the art of translation.
After a nineteen-year absence from full-time academic life, Dr Blankenhorn returned to Ireland in 2007. In 2009 she held a temporary appointment in Irish Folklore at University College Dublin, where she lectured in traditional song and song-collecting in Ireland. Later the same year, she took on a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she curated a website devoted to the career of the great Connemara sean-nós singer Joe Heaney (www.joeheaney.org). In 2011 Dr Blankenhorn rejoined the University of Edinburgh where she taught Irish literature from 1600 to undergraduates, and continued to pursue research interests in Scottish Gaelic and Irish song.
In 2023, Dr Blankenhorn became editor of Scottish Studies, the Journal of the School of Scottish Studies. Under her editorship, the journal is now published annually, online only, by Edinburgh Diamond (https://open.journals.ed.ac.uk/ScottishStudies). In 2024, all back issues of the journal were digitised and made available online free of charge.
Virginia Blankenhorn is an Honorary Fellow in Celtic and Scottish Studies.
CV
55165.pdf
Research summary
Dr Blankenhorn researches primarily in the fields of Scottish and Irish Gaelic song and verse. She places a strong focus on the ethnological aspects of her research, emphasising the context of performance in the transmission of music and metre. She has become known for her work in experimental song workshops and for the Joe Heaney online archive (http://www.joeheaney.org), which she helped curate while employed as an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at NUI Galway. In recent years, she has published articles on the continuum of metrical practice in Irish and Scottish Gaelic vernacular poetry; on the controversial career and importance of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser; on an updated classification of Gaelic song-types; and on the contribution of gender to the evolution of poetic diction in Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry.
A complete list of her publications is included in her CV, available on this web page; and many of her shorter works can be downloaded from https://edinburgh.academia.edu/VirginiaBlankenhorn.