Michael Newton

Dr Michael Newton earned a Ph.D. in Celtic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 1998 and was an Assistant Professor in the Celtic Studies department of St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia 2008-2013.

He has written a multitude of books and articles about Gaelic culture and history and is a leading authority on Scottish Gaelic heritage in North America. He was the editor of Dùthchas nan Gaidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes, which won the Saltire Society’s Research Book award of 2006, and the author of Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders, which was nominated for the 2009 Katharine Briggs Award for folklore research. In 2014 he was given the inaugural Saltire Award by the St. Andrews University Scottish Heritage Center (of Laurinburg, North Carolina) for his “outstanding contributions to the preservation and interpretation of Scottish history and culture.” His 2015 publication Seanchaidh na Coille / Memory-Keeper of the Forest: Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature of Canada, the first anthology of Gaelic-Canadian literature and analysis of it, was nominated for the Scholarly Writing category of the Atlantic Book Prize.

In 2018 he was recognized with the International award at the annual Scottish Gaelic awards in Glasgow, Scotland. The book that he co-edited with Wilson McLeod, An Ubhal as Àirde / The Highest Apple: An Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature, was awarded with the Best Gaelic Non-Fiction Book of 2020 by the Gaelic Books Council of Scotland. He was Advisor Historian for the video documentary Voices Over the Water (2023). He established the Hidden Glen Folk School of Scottish Highland Heritage in 2019 to teach a range of topics to students online for a global audience including Scotland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Association for Scottish Literature awarded an Honorary Fellowship to him in 2025 for making “a substantial and distinctive contribution to the Scottish literary tradition.”