Seamus Johnston holds a BA in History and Modern Irish from Trinity College Dublin (2008–2013) and an MA in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language from the University of Birmingham (2016–2019). He has been teaching English in Japan since 2014, first at Seiho Senior High School, and from 2019, at Reitaku University (Chiba, Japan), where he is a Senior Lecturer.

In March 2023 he started preparing his PhD at the University of Santiago de Compostela, within the research unit Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization and under the supervision of Zeltia Blanco-Suárez and Teresa Fanego. His dissertation topic is concerned with several historical developments in Irish English, on the basis of the digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin.

Fanego, Teresa & Seamus Johnston. 2026. The 1641 Depositions and the textual record of historical Irish English. Research in Corpus Linguistics 14(1). 36-71. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.14.01.02 

Fanego, Teresa, Seamus Johnston & Zeltia Blanco-Suárez. 2025. Tracing the origins and grammaticalization path of Irish English habitual do V: An analysis of the 1641 Depositions. Folia Linguistica Historica 46(1). 173-209. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2025-2001 

Johnston, Seamus, Zeltia Blanco-Suárez & Teresa Fanego. 2024. The English language of seventeenth-century Ireland: A corpus analysis of the 1641 Depositions. In Francisco Alonso-Almeida & Carmen Luján-García (eds.), Crossing Boundaries: Transatlantic Dialogues and Gendered Narratives. Selected Papers from the 46th International Conference of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), 36-41. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Servicio de Publicaciones y Difusión Científica de la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. 

Complete list of publications

2-3 September 2025: “Tracing the origins of habitual do in Irish English (a corpus study of the 1641 Depositions)”, JAECS 51st Conference (Japan Association for English Corpus Studies), Osaka University, Minoh Campus (Japan).

21-24 August 2024: “The genesis of Irish English habitual do: An analysis of the 1641 Depositions” [with Teresa Fanego & Zeltia Blanco-Suárez], 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, University of Helsinki (Finland).

18-22 June 2024: “Tracking Irish English habitual do: Do as a marker of habitual aspect in the 1641 Depositions” [with Teresa Fanego &  Zeltia Blanco-Suárez], 45th ICAME Conference, University of Vigo.

8-10 November 2023: “The English language of seventeenth-century Ireland: A corpus analysis of the 1641 Depositions” [with  Zeltia Blanco-Suárez & Teresa Fanego], 46th AEDEAN Conference, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.