Foster

Trinity Long Room Hub Top Ten

Supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1748. As a student he founded what would later become the College Historical Society, the oldest student society in the world. Burke entered Parliament in 1765 and quickly became a champion for political emancipation. After 1789, he directed his attention to the French Revolution and its immediate ramifications for political stability in England. To mark the university’s deep and lasting connection, and to express the inspiration his life and work as a public intellectual offer to us, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute has instituted a prestigious annual Edmund Burke lecture, delivered by a leading public intellectual of our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us today.


One of Burke’s central and life-long concerns was what moral codes should underpin the social order, constrain the use of power and inform our behaviour as responsible citizens. This is as important today as it was in Burke’s time, and the Edmund Burke lectures will keep his manifold legacies alive by providing a prominent forum for contributing in his spirit to the wider discourse about what society we want to live in and what traditions, perspectives and values we need to draw on in the shaping of our future.

Annual Edmund Burke Lectures

From October 6, 2022, Professor Michael Ignatieff delivered the Annual Edmund Burke Lecture for 2022, 'Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence.'

Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian writer, historian and former politician, now Rector Emeritus of the Central European University in Vienna and a professor in the history department.  He has been a leader of the Liberal Party of Canada as well as a professor at the Kennedy School, Harvard, and is the author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, The Needs of Strangers, On Consolation, and many other works. 

‘All democracies born of revolution—France, America, and Ireland, for example—have to find ways to reckon with their revolutionary origins, and with the violence that attended their birth. Since revolutions empower the people to rise up in defence of their rights, revolutionary origins can continue to inspire succeeding generations to defend theirs, but they can also pose a continuing challenge to the stability of democratic institutions.  Edmund Burke’s reflections on the revolutions of 1688 in Britain, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 can help us understand how contemporary democracies should handle the often combustible heritage of revolutionary origins.’

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH | 2022 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Professor Michael Ignatieff

A recording of a paper given at the UCD Centre for War Studies in March 2014. The paper, The Irish Revolutionary Generation, was given by Professor Roy Foster. 

Prof. Roy Foster (University of Oxford) is the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College Oxford and has written widely on Irish history, society and politics in the modern period, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture; the authorised biography of Yeats; Ireland in the late 20th Century; and currently the Irish revolutionary generation of 1890-1920, subject of his 2012 Ford Lectures, and a forthcoming book (2014). He is also a well known broadcaster, cultural commentator and critic.

Professor Foster was introduced by the Director of the UCD Centre for War Studies, Professor Robert Gerwarth. 

http://historyhub.ie/podcast-roy-foster-irish-revolutionary-generation

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Roy Foster - The Irish Revolutionary Generation

Recorded November 16th, 2023.

The Trinity Long Room Hub 2023 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture  was delivered by Professor Joanna Bourke on ‘Contemplating Evil: “Monstrous” Women in History, Politics, and Law, 1890s to the Present’.

Joanna Bourke is Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also the Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, including What it means to be Human (2011) and Fear: A Cultural History (2015), as well as over 120 articles in academic journals. In 2022, Reaktion Books published Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence and OUP published Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Education for Working People. Her Edmund Burke Lecture will draw on the subject of her current research towards a book entitled Evil Women. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Annual Edmund Burke Lecture is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH | 2023 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Professor Joanna Bourke

Roy Foster's book 'Vivid Faces' investigates the world of the revolutionary generation 1890-1923 and the extraordinary people who occupied it.

Humanities: Roy Foster

A talk by Music Blogger and Writer Nialler9 as part of the First Up lunchtime lecture series organised as a collaboration between the M.Phil in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Science Gallery Dublin and Trinity Long Room Hub.

Event Details:
Date: 10 December 2014
Time: 13:00
Venue: Neill/Hoey Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

First Up Lunchtime Lecture Series: Nialler9 (Music Blogger & Writer)

Recorded November 26th, 2024.

The Trinity Long Room Hub is delighted to welcome author and columnist Fintan O'Toole to present the 2024 Edmund Burke Lecture, 'Terror and Self-Pity: The Reactionary Sublime', which is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.


Fintan O'Toole is an author and columnist. His books include We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize for political writing. He is also Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University.


About the Annual Edmund Burke Lectures
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1748. As a student he founded what would later become the College Historical Society, the oldest student society in the world. Burke entered Parliament in 1765 and quickly became a champion for political emancipation. After 1789, he directed his attention to the French Revolution and its immediate ramifications for political stability in England. To mark the university’s deep and lasting connection, and to express the inspiration his life and work as a public intellectual offer to us, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute has instituted a prestigious annual Edmund Burke lecture, delivered by a leading public intellectual of our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us today.

One of Burke’s central and life-long concerns was what moral codes should underpin the social order, constrain the use of power and inform our behaviour as responsible citizens. This is as important today as it was in Burke’s time, and the Edmund Burke lectures will keep his manifold legacies alive by providing a prominent forum for contributing in his spirit to the wider discourse about what society we want to live in and what traditions, perspectives and values we need to draw on in the shaping of our future.

Learn more at www/tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

TLRH | 2024 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Fintan O'Toole

As Ireland geared up to vote on the marriage equality referendum on May 22nd 2015, multi-award-winning Irish author Colm Tóibín gave a public lecture on same-sex relationships in literature on May 14th 2015. 

The lecture was followed by a panel discussion with Dr Paul Delaney (TCD), Dr Heather Ingman (TCD) and Prof Danielle Clarke (UCD), chaired by Prof Nicholas Grene (TCD).  The event was organised by Dr Brendan O’Connell and Dr Pádraic Whyte from the School of English as part of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s ‘Behind the Headlines’ discussion series and supported by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Event Details:
Date: Thursday, 14 May 2015 
Time: 18:30 
Venue: Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Photo Credit: Stephen Pyke

Behind the Headlines | The Embrace of Love: Being Gay in Ireland Now

Recorded October 15th 2025.

The Trinity Long Room Hub is delighted to welcome author and historian William Dalrymple to present the 2025 Edmund Burke Lecture, entitled 'The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire', which is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.

About William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuściński award-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction) and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Bronze Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, The Golden Road, is a revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He is the co-host of the Empire podcast, which explores the intricate stories of revolutions, imperial wars, and the people who built and lost empires. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

TLRH | 2025 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | William Dalrymple

Recorded October 20th, 2015.

"An Inheritance From Our Forefathers"? Historians and the Memory of the Irish Revolution

The 2015 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture by Prof Roy Foster (Carroll Chair of Irish History, University of Oxford, and Visiting Parnell Fellow, Magdalene College, Cambridge)which is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.

Read the article: https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/prof-roy-foster-explores-the-challenges-of-commemoration-at-public-lecture/

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH | 2015 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Professor Roy Foster

Recorded March 23, 2016.

A public lecture by Prof Samuel Rickless (University of California) during his term as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy.

Learn more at: www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism

Recorded May 25, 2016.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Humanities Horizons Lecture for 2016 was delivered by Prof Geoffrey Crossick (Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Director of the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project).

Abstract: How should we understand the difference that arts and culture makes to individuals and to society? The case is too often presented in terms of benefits that are thought to be important to the government of the day while neglecting some of the more fundamental benefits that matter to us all. Do we need to think again about how we discuss these issues, not make claims that cannot be easily substantiated, and also show that the arts and humanities methods have a good deal to offer as we seek evidence for the difference that arts and culture makes.

Learn more at: www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

2016 | Understanding The Value Of Arts And Culture

Recorded November 5, 2019.

The Future of Ireland: Human Rights and Children’s Rights

Ireland’s future sets before us a series of questions about constitutional and Church-State relationships. The vast majority of current Church members (around 84 percent worldwide and considerably higher in Ireland) were baptized as babies. For the Catholic majority in Ireland this has resulted in the imposition of onerous obligations on children long before they are equipped to evaluate them or agree to them. However, a more fundamental issue still lies unresolved and that is always allowing the right of parents to present their child for Baptism and raise the child in their faith, whether the child can, in international human rights law, be held to denominational membership and obligations entered when he or she was non sui compos. The has special significance for Ireland given the dominant position of the Catholic Church particularly in education and healthcare in Ireland but the general issues addressed have transferable implications for other denominations and faith systems.  In this lecture, Professor Mary McAleese will explore how we define and vindicate a child’s right to religious freedom, conscience, opinion and belief as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to which Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Holy See are all State Parties.

The Annual Edmund Burke Lecture is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH | 2019 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Former President of Ireland, Professor Mary McAleese

Opened in 2010, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute is dedicated to advancing Trinity College Dublin’s rich tradition of research excellence in the Arts and Humanities, on an individual, collaborative and inter-disciplinary basis.

TLRH | 2015 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Professor Roy Foster

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