Ranke de Vries is Chair of the Department of Celtic Studies and holder of the Ben Alder Chair in Celtic Studies. She holds a Masters in Celtic Languages and Literature, as well as a Masters in Medieval Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and a PhD in Early Irish from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘De causis torchi Corc’ Óche and Aided Echach maic Maireda’, which was revised and published in 2012 as volume 65 of the Irish Texts Society series. In 2014, she came to St Francis Xavier University from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she spent several years as a professor in Celtic Languages and Culture.

Her research interests include medieval Irish and Welsh languages and literatures, narrative tradition, textual edition and the history of medieval (Celtic) medicine. She is currently involved in the MMIST project (Medicine in Medieval Irish Saga Texts), which seeks to investigate to what degree medieval Irish scholars made use of continental European and Arabic medical tradition prior to the appearance of the earliest medical manuscripts in the 15th century. In 2024-25 she is teaching CELT 131 & 132 (Celtic Civilizations I & II), CELT 323 (Medieval Manuscripts, fall term), CELT 349 (Medieval Medicine, winter term), and CELT 521 & 522 (Old Irish I & II).