Meredith ap Robert

Category: Wales

  • The Welsh Learner’s Diary: Two Weeks in Aberystwyth

    The Welsh Learner’s Diary: Two Weeks in Aberystwyth

    I recently spent two weeks in Aberystwyth for intensive Welsh-language classes. Here’s a little diary of my time, mostly notes I wrote to myself as it happened to capture a bit of the experience.

  • This wasn’t entirely inevitable

    This wasn’t entirely inevitable

    Since last week’s local and devolved elections, I’ve heard a lot of the I-word floating around. How inevitable everything was. How voters were dissatisfied with the pace of change so it was inevitable that Labour would lose. I think Morgan had cards left to play—maybe Labour couldn’t have kept power, but she could’ve kept her…

  • What I’m thinking about on the day of the 2026 Senedd elections

    What I’m thinking about on the day of the 2026 Senedd elections

    Today, Scotland and Wales both have devolved parliamentary elections. So, here in Cymru, we’re deciding who will represent us in the Senedd in Cardiff, our capital. Unless the polls have been incredibly mistaken, Labour’s century-long hold on Cymru is over. The question is: what’s next? Will UK’s answer to MAGA, Reform, come away as the…

  • What the Middle Ages Can Tell Us About Racial Reconfiguration and Political Realignment Today

    We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again —  “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to…

  • Saying Goodbye to America, and Finding Our Town in Cymru

    Saying Goodbye to America, and Finding Our Town in Cymru

    As a bi-national couple, our story has never been a simple one—but it’s always been good.  

  • A week in Wales by train

    A week in Wales by train

    Wales is mostly rural, and best suited for adventurers (of any skill level) who enjoy the outdoors, want to get off the beaten path, and don’t mind a little rain. While it’s great to have a car, it’s also totally possible to get around by train and bus.

  • Diary of a dysgwr

    Diary of a dysgwr

    Lifelong learner.  A laudable philosophy. Looks nice on your LinkedIn. But in practice? As something more than a slogan? Exhausting.  In my 20s, fresh out of school, it felt like an invigorating mantra. A celebratory affirmation of the wonder of the universe. As I approach 40 and find myself nearing the likely halfway point of…

  • Driving out the Dark; Or, Making My Peace with Christmas

    Driving out the Dark; Or, Making My Peace with Christmas

    My feelings on Christmas hit an all-time low when I lived in Indiana.  I took a job working for the Purdue Alumni Association. Not a great fit. Things went from bad to worse a few months into the job when we returned from Thanksgiving break to find the entire building covered in Christmas decorations. It…

  • Finding My Way Back

    Finding My Way Back

    When a friend from undergrad heard about my plans to pursue a master’s degree in Wales (Cymru), she told me, “It’s wonderful to hear you’ve found what brings you joy—and will send you to Wales, where you’ve always belonged.”  And it’s true. Call it a longing or a calling, but I’ve felt it for a…

  • Writing from the other side of a year

    Writing from the other side of a year

    A year ago, I found out that I was losing my job.  Two months into a graduate program is particularly bad timing (or at least it felt that way at the time). And right after moving in together with my husband to our first apartment, in a new city, with no friends or social network. …