Jaski, Bart 1964–

PERSONAL: Born October 15, 1964, in Zuidlaren, Netherlands; son of Walter (a teacher) and Wil (van den Berge) Jaski; married Katharina Lanting, September 5, 1998; children: Louisa, Valerie. Education: Attended University of Gröningen, 1983–87; National University of Ireland, University College, Cork, M.Phil. (first-class honors), 1989; Trinity College, Dublin, Ph.D., 1994. Hobbies and other interests: Music, reading, skiing, field hockey.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Celtic, University of Utrecht, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, Netherlands. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, historian, and educator. Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, editorial assistant for Thesaurus Linguarum Hiberniae, 1992–94; National Archives, The Hague, Netherlands, research assistant, 1996–98; Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, The Hague, researcher at University of Utrecht, 1998–2002; University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands, lecturer in Celtic studies, 2002–. Van Hamel Foundation for Celtic Studies, chair, 1997–2004. Exchange scholar in Ireland, Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education, 1988.

WRITINGS:

Early Irish Kingship and Succession, Four Courts Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2000.

(Editor, with I. Genee and B. Smelik) Arthur, Brigit, Conn, Deirdre … Verhaal, taal en recht in de Keltische wereld: Liber amicorum voor Leni van Strien-Gerritsen, De Keltische Draak (Nijmegen, Netherlands), 2003.

Contributor to books, including The Fragility of Her Sex? Medieval Irish Women in Their European Context, edited by C.E. Meek and K. Simms, Blackrock, 1996; and The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West, edited by Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, [Groningen, Netherlands], 1997. Contributor to scholarly journals, including Early Medieval Europe, Ériu, Peritia, and Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies. Coeditor, Kelten, 2004–.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on the Irish origin legends and the transmission of texts in manuscripts.

SIDELIGHTS: Bart Jaski told CA: "When I studied history at the University of Gröningen, I attended a class by Richard Vaughan on the Vikings. The story about the battle of Clontarf in 1014 caught my imagination, and I became interested in the Vikings in Ireland, especially after reading books by Alfred P. Smyth, Edmund Curtis, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin. The last became my supervisor when I went to Ireland for a year after being awarded an exchange scholarship. At the University College in Cork I wrote an M.Phil. thesis about the political role of the Vikings in Ireland. The results were encouraging, so after a year in the Netherlands I enrolled for a Ph.D. in medieval history at Trinity College, Dublin. My supervisor, Katharine Simms, told me that I had to look for a more challenging topic than political history, so I chose Irish regnal succession, as I found that the current theories about that were not fitting the evidence. My doctoral thesis, rewritten and with three chapters added, was published as Early Irish Kingship and Succession.

"I like writing about early Irish history because it is complex and challenging. There is still much important work to be done, so it is a very rich field of study. My interest in it is not focused on one or two topics, but covers almost all aspects of the whole period and more, and it extends to ties between Ireland and the rest of Europe. Ireland often followed the same trends as its neighbors, but because of the different sort of evidence, this is often not immediately visible. As a non-Irishman and a trained historian, I tend to look at certain matters from a different perspective than Irish scholars do."