DrTiber Falzett

Dr Tiber F.M. Falzett's research practice in folklore and ethnology centres upon person-to-person communication in everyday life through the direct participant observation methods of ethnography, enabling the documentation of traditional knowledge systems and creative expression. These approaches to documentation provide invaluable insights integral to the sustainability and resilience of the communities that practice, maintain, transmit and transform them often in the face of environmental, social and economic crises. Dr Falzett's research in endangered ethnolinguistic communities challenges extractivist models of research documentation and creation and seeks to recenter ethnographic practice through collaborative community-driven auto-ethnographic enquiry.

Tiber Falzett has conducted over fifteen years of fieldwork among Scottish Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. His research explores the relationship between language, music and the construction of community through socially-rooted forms of local knowledge as expressed, transmitted and maintained by Gaelic-speakers on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Before joining the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore as a lecturer in Folklore and Ethnology, Tiber served as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Folklore Curriculum (American Studies). At UNC-CH, he was the inaugural SHUSA Lecturer in Scottish Gaelic Studies, the first dedicated academic post in Scottish Gaelic studies in the United States of America.

He holds his Ph.D. (Celtic and Scottish Studies) and MScR with Distinction (Scottish Ethnology) from the University of Edinburgh, programs with integrated research ties to the School of Scottish Studies Archives, an organization with longstanding links to UCD’s National Folklore Collection.

His Ph.D. dissertation, "''Tighinn o’n Cridhe'—‘Coming from the Centre’: An Ethnography of Sensory Metaphor on Scottish Gaelic Communal Aesthetics," investigates the functional utility and creativity of seanchas-based metaphors in conveying an embodied understanding of the aesthetics of song, storytelling, instrumental music and dance at the communal level.