Joseph Watson (academic)

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Joseph Watson (Seosamh) is Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin, a Celtic Faculty chair which dates from the foundation of the National University.

Professor Watson was head boy at RBAI ('Inst') during 1961-1962 from where he won an open scholarship in Classics to King's College, Cambridge. He carried out postgraduate work thereafter in Celtic languages at Edinburgh University and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and, following a period in the Irish Civil Service, was appointed to the Dept of Modern Irish at UCD in 1970.

As Seosamh Watson, he is familiar to students and scholars of Irish language and literature on account of numerous academic, as well as more popular, books and articles. He has made a special linguistic study of the Scottish Highlanders' culture in Nova Scotia and is particularly interested in connections between Ulster and Gaelic Scotland. He is a founding member of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, and joint editor of the multi-volume UNESCO Atlas Linguarum Europae, published in the University of Florence, and is a laison with the National Spiritual Assembly of Ireland for the Association for the Baha'i Studies for English Speaking Europe^[1] Watson has presented an Irish Gaelic translation of The Hidden Words by Bahá'u'lláh.^[2]

Prominent members of Ireland's Bahá'í religious community, he and his wife, Dr Vivien Hick of the National Museum of Ireland, have six children. They helped set up the Oideas Gael adult learning institution in Glencolmcille, County Donegal. Programmes there are attended now by over 1,000 participants annually.^[3]

He has been dean since 1995 of UCD's Celtic Studies Faculty.