Dr Andrew Jennings

Shetland College UHI
Gremista Rd
Lerwick
Shetland ZE1 0PX

andrew.jennings@uhi.ac.uk
tel: +44 (0)1595 771 406

Available to talk to the media about

  • History, Culture and Folklore of Shetland
  • Norse Place-names
  • Vikings in Scotland
  • Vikings in Popular Culture
  • The North Atlantic Cultural Zone
  • Sagas

In these languages

English

Biography

1994 – 2000 worked with DA Study Tours developing and guiding historical/cultural tours for interested adults, both private (including tours for Historic Scotland) and brochured (including tours to Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Finland, Provence, Galicia, the Faroe Islands, Outer Hebrides, Rum and Eigg, Sutherland and Tiree)

1997 Broadcasting 9 month full-time Researcher contract BBC Radio Scotland on the international travel show 'The Case for Packing'

1991 – 1998 Adult Learning Lecturer University of Edinburgh 1991-1993
University of Stirling 1991-1998

Part-time Lecturer Scandinavian Department, University of Edinburgh 1996 to 2009.
Honorary Research Fellow Scandinavian Department, University of Edinburgh 2004 to 2009

2000 to present owner of Antiquarian Bookshop

2008 Visiting lecturer UHI Cultural Studies, Shetland College

Programme Leader on the Institute for Northern Studies MLitt Programmes - Highlands and Islands Culture, Highlands and Islands Literature, Island Studies, Orkney and Shetland Studies and Vikng Studies.

Current research

I research the place-names and history of Shetland and the Vikings, both in the past and the present!

Research groups and interests

Hjaltland Research Network

Selected publications

'Fugl/Fogl – An unusual Hebridean personal name' in Notes and Queries of the Society of West Highland and Island Historical Research Series 2 no.8 (1991)

'Galloway and Gall-Gaidheil' in Proceedings of the Association of Postgraduate Scottish Historical Research Day Conference Edinburgh (Edinburgh 1993)

'Historic and linguistic evidence for Gall-Gaidheil and Norse in Western Scotland' in Language contact across the North Atlantic, Linguistische Arbeiten 359 (Tubingen 1996)

'Iona and the Vikings: a study in survival' in Northern Studies (Edinburgh 1998)

'Isles and Mann: Kingdom of' & 'Galloway: GallGaidheil' in Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford 2001)

'The Norse Place-Names of Kintyre' in K. Holman & J. Adams, eds., Scandinavia and Europe 800-1350: Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence. (Turnhout 2004).

‘The Ethnic Enigma’, in Andras Mortensen and Símun V. Arge, eds., Viking and Norse in the North Atlantic. Selected papers from the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Viking Congress (Torshavn 2005)

‘Something funny about Funzie’ in The New Shetlander, Yule No.242 (Lerwick 2007)

'One coast - three peoples: names and ethnicity in the Scottish west during the early Viking period' in A.Woolf ed. Scandinavian Scotland-Twenty Years On (St Andrews 2009)

‘Gygrs, guykerls and other grotesque females in the landscape’ in The New Shetlander, Hairst No.249 (Lerwick 2009)

‘The Giantess as a Metaphor for Shetland’s Cultural History’ in SHIMA: The International Journal of Studies into Island Cultures (2010)

‘From Dál Riata to the Gall-Ghàidheil’ in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 5 (Brepols 2010)

‘Shetland and Byzantium’ in Unkans (2011)