William Lamb

Professor William Lamb was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He completed a BA in Psychology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1993 and spent two years as an RA on a Johns Hopkins led research project on sleep disorders and biometrics. After taking an interest in Gaelic and traditional music in his early twenties, he went to Nova Scotia to learn Gaelic and spent a year at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. Will began his postgraduate study at the University of Edinburgh in 1996, taking an MSc in Celtic Studies. His dissertation was on the development of the Gaelic news register. He started a PhD in Linguistics the following year, in which he studied Gaelic stylistic variation. In Jan 2000, nearing the end of his PhD, he moved to North Uist to take up a lecturing position at Lews Castle College Benbecula (University of the Highlands and Islands). While in Uist, Will completed several publications, but largely concentrated on music and sound engineering. In 2010, he returned to the University of Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology. Will was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017 and Professor (Personal Chair in Gaelic Ethnology and Linguistics) in 2022. His research interests span music, traditional narrative, speech and language processing and Gaelic linguistic variation. He lives in Penicuik, a village outside of Edinburgh.