Fay Slakey is a second-year graduate student in the department of Comparative Literature. Before coming to Princeton, she earned her BA in Modern Literature at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France. She holds two masters’ degrees from the same university, the first in Medieval Celtic Languages and the second in Medieval History. Her first masters’ thesis focused on the epistemology of the Celtic sources of the legend of Tristan and Isolde and was awarded the Geneviève Nore prize by the Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur based at the Sorbonne. Her second masters’ thesis consisted in a methodical study of the manuscript witnesses to the Medieval Welsh laws of Hywel Dda, investigating the context of their production and the progressive construction of an origin narrative. Concurrent to this second masters,’ she interned for nine months at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Research (CRBC) where she learned how to manage an archival collection, from its inventory to its digitization and publication online.

Her research focuses on Medieval French and Medieval Welsh texts and manuscripts, as well as the epistemology of the field of Celtic Studies. More broadly, she is interested in digital humanities, the philosophy of language and phenomenology, as well theories of storytelling and writing systems.