Sinéad O’Sullivan is Professor of Early Medieval Intellectual History, Queen’s University Belfast. Her research has resulted in substantial monographs, co-edited books, and numerous solo-authored articles and scholarly book chapters. Her first book was an edition of and commentary on glosses on Prudentius’s Psychomachia, an allegorical work that had a profound influence through the Middle Ages into the early modern era. The second on the reception of Martianus’s textbook on the liberal arts illumines the central work underpinning medieval ideas of education and learning. Providing comprehensive first editions of early medieval glosses on foundational texts, both books establish the significance of glosses as evidence for early medieval intellectual activity. The larger issues arising from these studies pertaining to micro-texts and hypertexts reach right into the modern world. Collaborations on interdisciplinary projects have extended the scope of research into the areas of the classical commentary tradition, the materiality of the medieval book, practices of reading, the medieval conception of earth, and Carolingian liturgical culture. Her current book project probes annotations on Virgil and the Psalms for insight into the creation of an imperial imaginary across the medieval West, c. 750-900.

Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London, she was Principal Investigator on an AHRC Leadership fellowship (2020-2021; https://craftingknowledge.wordpress.com/). Thanks to a Leverhulme International Fellowship (2017), she held visiting fellowships at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Galway; Huygens ING, Amsterdam; Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris; and Greek and Latin Philology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. She has also been the recipient of a Scaliger Fellowship at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden, and has reviewed funding applications for national and international funding bodies in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and USA as well as for the European Research Council.

Previous awards include an AHRC Research Fellowship (2009-2010), National University of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003-2005), Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, Irish Research Council (2001-2002), Research Fellowship, University College Cork (2000-2001), Wingate Scholarship, Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, London (1998-1999), Rhodes Scholarship, Rhodes Trust, Oxford (1995-1998), Olwyn Rhys Scholarship, St. Anne’s College, Oxford (1995-1997), DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) awards (Munich 2002 and Heidelberg 1991), and a Research Fellowship, University of Konstanz (1992-1993). 

Invited to sit on the advisory boards for the Leverhulme funded project Boethius in Early Medieval Europe (University of Oxford) and the Irish Research Council funded project Global and Local Scholarship on Annotated Manuscripts (University of Galway) as well as to contribute expert articles for international collaborative research projects in Stockholm, Helsinki, Zurich, Vienna and Princeton, Sinéad O’Sullivan has served as guest editor for a collaborative digital project at the Huygens Institute (Leiden), organised and co-organised international conferences (the Hague, Leiden and Belfast), and edited major research volumes. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for The Journal of Medieval Latin.

Sinead O'Sullivan teaches on the following programmes / modules:

Undergraduate/Postgraduate

Relevant Websites

Full CV at https://sineadosullivansite.wordpress.com/

Current project: https://craftingknowledge.wordpress.com/

Colloquium: Crafting knowledge in the early medieval book: practices of collecting and concealing, Queen’s University, Belfast, 12-13 July 2021

Public Exhibition: ‘Ciphers, Codes and Notes: Crafting Knowledge in the Medieval and Modern Worlds.’ The McClay Library.

Online Exhibition: Ciphers, Codes, and Notes: Crafting Knowledge in the Medieval and Modern Worlds. 

Public Engagement Event: Ciphers and Codes, Past, Present, Future, The Great Hall, Queen's University, Belfast (Schools of HAPP and EEECS & Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London)

Online Lecture: IHR Earlier Middle Ages Seminar: Reading the Psalms in the Carolingian Age.

Podcast: How and Why History: Who was Charlemagne https://tv.historyhit.com/?fbclid=IwAR244owq5LwBnOUweKqbAYbAEDTYx19SUq10hivHJhURN_Gn1xFxwhp7rOc