Charles W. Dunn, professor of Celtic Languages and Literature, will be the new Master of Quincy House. His appointment was approved yesterday by the Board of Overseers.
Dunn, who is chairman of the only Celtic department in the country will succeed John M. Bullitt '43 as Master. Bullitt will work next year as Peace Corps director for a South American country, probably Peru.
Dunn has been at Harvard for three years and is an associate of Lowell House. He received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard; he studied as an undergraduate at MacMaster's College in Ontario, Canada.
Dunn will not continue as chairman of his department when he becomes Master July 1. "He's just going to work twice as hard as he has been working," John V. Kelleher '28, Professor of Modern Irish Literature and Philology, said yesterday.
"In the past three years Dunn has worked out a full Ph.D. program in Celtic Languages," Kelleher said. He secured NDEA fellowships for many of the Ph.D. candidates, who are the first in the department's history.
"His interests are anything but narrowly linguistic," Kelleher added. Dunn's life work is a literary history of the 12th century. He has divided his research between medieval literature and modern Celtic folk cultures. Besides a number of articles and translations. Dunn has written two full books: Highland Settler: A Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Nova Scotia and The Foundling and the Werwolf: A Literary-Historical Study of Guiliamume de Palerne.
Dunn teaches one undergraduate course: Celtic 100. "Celtic Literature in Translation." Some undergraduates also attend his courses in Middle Irish, Early Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic.
He has taught at Cornell, N.Y.U., and the University College of the University of Toronto. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Britain when he was asked to teach at Harvard.
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