Oliver Padel

Oliver James Padel (born 31 October 1948) is an authority on the origin and meaning of place-names, currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in the University of Cambridge [1] and Visiting Professor of Celtic at the University of the West of England.

He was born in 1948. He is the son of John Hunter Padel and his wife Hilda (nee Barlow), daughter of Sir Alan Barlow, 2nd Baronet and his wife Nora, (nee Darwin), through whom he is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. His older sister is the poet Ruth Padel.

He was awarded an M.Litt. for his thesis on the inscriptions of Pictland by the University of Edinburgh in 1972. He was a founding member of staff of the Institute of Cornish Studies (in the Charles Thomas era), until around 1991, when he moved to Cambridge.

He is President of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland,[2] and of the English Place-Name Society. He edits the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall. He is a Member of Council of the Devon and Cornwall Record Society.[3]

Contents

Selected publications

Linguistic and literary studies

Editions, translations and other contributions

References and notes

  1. ^ Cambridge University directory of Research Staff.
  2. ^ Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland website
  3. ^ Genuki's account of the Devon and Cornwall Record Society