Composed for TARDIGRADE, a collaboration with choreographer Philip Connaughton. 

More details at michaeljgallen.com

Difference In Clouds (String Quartet)

 In this podcast Mathias Risse, professor of philosophy and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, discusses his recent paper, "The Human Right to Water and Common Ownership of the Earth" which posits that humanity's shared possession of our planet provides a philosophical foundation for a right to water and sanitation. 

The Human Right to Water: a Conversation with Mathias Risse

In this episode, an interview with Dr Ivar McGrath, senior lecturer in the UCD School of History and Archives, and Principal Investigator on ‘Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’. As part of this project a pilot website 'Army Barracks of Eighteenth-Century Ireland' has been developed and is now available online. 

Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland - http://barracks18c.ucd.ie/ 

The project, led by Dr Ivar McGrath and Dr Patrick Walsh, is developing a free electronic platform for research outputs that are using spatial and other data in order to create online maps and further data relating to state and society in eighteenth-century Ireland. Three current projects at UCD - mapping barracks, boroughs, and revenue collection ports and districts – will form the initial basis for the electronic platform. A further component on Law and Order is also in gestation at QUB. The platform will facilitate the integration in coming years of future projects on other aspects of state and society in the period, thereby creating a unique and essential electronic research tool for understanding eighteenth-century Ireland. 

The first phase of the project involves mapping all of the army barracks built between 1690 and 1815, and preparing supporting webpages that will contain further information, data, images and resources for each barracks. A pilot map of 142 barracks built throughout Ireland and webpages with detailed information for barracks in County Armagh are now available here http://barracks18c.ucd.ie/.  As part of this undertaking, we are keen to develop contacts with local communities and stakeholders around the country and to build connections with similar projects and websites. We therefore welcome all comments and other feedback.

http://barracks18c.ucd.ie/ 


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Ivar McGrath - Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

'From Sinai to the Skelligs: Evidence for Cultural Contact Between the Insular and Near Eastern Churches, including New Material from St Catherine's Monastery', a public lecture by Prof Michelle P Brown (University of London) during her term as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub.

Event Details:
Date: Monday, 9 February 2015
Time: 18:00
Venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub

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

'From Sinai to the Skelligs'

Recorded November 18th, 2025.

Rough Magic Theatre Company, in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub, presents Embracing Uncertainty: An Evening with Margaret Heffernan, Roy Foster and Tommy Tiernan.

In a world where change is constant, the future rarely unfolds as expected. How do we learn not just to endure uncertainty, but to harness it? Drawing upon her recent book Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians & Artists Thrive in an Unpredictable World (2025), Margaret Heffernan makes the case that creative practice isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. She argues that business structures, government policy, leadership models must give space to ambiguity, flexibility and emotional stamina - the very qualities artists exercise daily.
In this unique event, acclaimed author, speaker, and entrepreneur Dr Margaret Heffernan joins eminent historian Roy Foster and broadcaster-actor-comedian Tommy Tiernan to explore how artistic practice offers vital lessons for corporate leaders, policy makers, and culture creators alike. By galvanizing our creativity, Heffernan puts artistic practice firmly at the centre of strategic thinking.

For artists, the evening will affirm practice: that creativity, failure and improvisation aren’t just expressive, they are survival tools. For business leaders and corporate or government sectors, this is a call to reframe unpredictability not as a threat, but as entering territory where innovation lives. When organisations embrace uncertainty, they open possibilities. They build resilience.

Learn more at www.tcd.ietrinitylongroomhub

Embracing Uncertainty

Panel discussion, chaired by Catriona Crowe with Margaret O’Callaghan, Margaret MacCurtain and author Lucy McDiarmid. 

The discussion is followed by the launch of At home in the revolution - what women said and did in 1916. 

At Home in the Revolution as a publication derives its material from women’s own accounts of the Easter Rising, interpreted broadly to include also the Howth gun-running and events that took place over the summer of 1916 in Ireland. These eye-witness narratives -- diaries, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, and official witness statements -- were written by nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants, women who felt completely at home in the garrisons, cooking for the men and treating their wounds, and women who stayed at home during the Rising. The book’s focus is on the kind of episode usually ignored by traditional historians: cooking with bayonets, arguing with priests, resisting sexual harassment, soothing a female prostitute, doing sixteen-hand reels in Kilmainham Gaol, or disagreeing with Prime Minister Asquith about the effect of the Rising on Dublin’s architecture. The women’s ‘small behaviours’, to use Erving Goffman’s term, reveal social change in process, not the official history of manifestoes and legislation, but the unofficial history of access to a door or a leap through a window; they show how issues of gender were negotiated at a time of revolution.

Speakers: 
-Mary E. Daly, President of the Royal Irish Academy 
-Lucy McDiarmid, Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English 
-Catriona Crowe MRIA, National Archives of Ireland 
-Dr Margaret O'Callaghan, Queen's University Belfast 
-Dr Margaret Mac Curtain, historian

At home in the revolution - Panel discussion and book launch

Undermining Democracy: Challenges to Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 

Democratic values and institutions are being increasingly undermined and eroded in established and transitioning democracies across central and Eastern Europe. Providing perspectives on these serious developments in Poland, Hungary and Germany, this Forum will explore the implications for Ireland and Europe more widely and consider what measures could be taken to safeguard the rule of law and democratic principles so fundamental to the idea of Europe. This event is part of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s ‘Behind the Headlines’ discussion series which offers background analyses to current issues by experts drawing on the long-term perspectives of Arts & Humanities research.

Event Details:
Date: Tuesday, 14 June 2016 |
Time: 18:15 
Venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub 

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

Behind the Headlines | Undermining Democracy

What can activist and thinker John Ruskin's (1819 -1900) ideas of beauty, nature and social value, teach us about the functioning of art in contemporary society?

For a round-table conversation led by Adam Sutherland of Grizedale Arts, guests Robert Hewison (Curator of Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites in Ruskin’s Centenary, Tate Britain, 2000); Charlie Gere (Professor, Media Theory and History, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts) and A Fair Land artists Francesca Ulivi and Niamh Riordan address how the increasing professionalisation of artists and institutions separate us from creativity in the everyday. 

This discussion is part of  A Fair Land project at IMMA, in collaboration with Grizedale Arts UK.

This talk took place on Wednesday 8 June 2016,  IMMA

Image Credits: Adam Sutherland, Director of Grizedale Arts, wearing a John Ruskin head and wielding a ‘Fors Clavigera’ baton.


Discussion: On Ruskin and the Social Function of Artists

Author Mark O’Connell draws on his acclaimed publication, To be a Machine (2016) in which to discuss our desires, delusions and use of technology to alter the human condition to escape mortality and our biological lives. This is followed by a discussion, moderated by Dr. Sinead Hogan, Lecturer & Co-Director, ARC, IADT. 

Further Information

To be a Machine - Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death - is the first book, by Dublin-based essayist and critic Mark O’Connell which explores the philosophical and scientific roots of transhumanism; a movement that believes we can and should use technology to control the future evolution of our species, to enable us to live, perhaps, forever. The transhumanism movement campaigns for the direct incorporation of technology into our bodies and minds, and strives to remove ageing as a cause of death. But what does this mean for human consciousness and an embodied sense of self? These are just some of the fascinating and critical questions that O’Connell’s book invites us to explore about possible futures of  technology.


Programmed in collaboration with IADT- ARC as part of the IMMA digital_self public programme of talks, events and online projects invites all ages to explore the ways new technologies are transforming how the self is voiced, shaped and understood in various digital realms.
 
Mark O'Connell is a journalist, essayist, and literary critic from Dublin. His book, To Be a Machine: Encounters With a Post-Human Future, will be published by Granta (UK & Commonwealth) and Doubleday (US & Canada) in 2017. He is Slate’s books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog; his work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Observer, and The Independent. He is also the author of the Kindle Single Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever (Byliner/The Millions).
He has a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and in 2013 his academic monograph on the work of the novelist John Banville, John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. He was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow from 2011 to 2012 at Trinity College, where he taught contemporary literature. For more details visit here.

This talk took place on Tuesday 30 January 2018  at IMMA.

Digital_self

IMMA & IADT: ARC Talk / To Be a Machine – Mark O’Connell

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.

Embracing Uncertainty

TLRHub

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