Niall Ó Súilleabháin – Medieval Historian

Welcome (back) to this website’s blog, in a new and improved 2026 edition!

To my everlasting shame, since I set this website up in early 2024, I have managed a grand total of two (2) blog posts, combined with not a single update on my career, publications etc. This is an abysmal track record, particularly give that having an independent record of these sort of things was the raison d’etre of this site. I knew I wouldn’t be the kind of person who would update on a daily or weekly basis – there’s a reason I wrote in the ‘About’ section that this blog would be updated “intermittently” – but I didn’t even manage to clear that incredibly low bar. I’ve had less than one post/update per annum on average; while hosting a simple website like this isn’t very expensive, they are still two very expensive posts!

I have had my reasons, however. Life has been very busy. Since I’ve last updated this website, I’ve had an article and a book chapter published, and that article won a prize, AND I’ve been slowly writing even more (watch this space). I’ve also moved job (and country) twice, given multiple lectures and seminar papers, and have applied for more fellowships and employment opportunities (both within and without academia) than I can count. So I (selfishly enough) will cut myself some slack about the lack of attention given to this website.

However, given that I’m still technically an early career academic (‘early’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there), not having a solid online presence to promote my work is something of a missed opportunity. This post is therefore the launch of a new phase in this blog. There are going to be quite a few announcements happening in the coming weeks – big, exciting news! – and I want to use this as a space to promote as much of that news as possible. There will be at least one big announcement this week, and I’m planning a mini-series of blog posts thereafter which will tie into this, so you should all expect much more regular posting and updates here until at least the end of October. Beyond that, I expect things will slow down a bit, but hopefully never again to reach the nadir of <1 blog post/year. Thanks for sticking around/coming back, and stay tuned for lots more to come!