Fellow In Focus 2022-23

Recorded February 27, 2023.

An 'in conversation' event featuring Visiting Research Fellow Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews) in conversation with Prof Aileen Douglas (Professor of English, TCD) and organized by Trinity Long Room Hub.

Susan Manly is a Reader in English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her research interests are in Romantic-period Irish and English literature. She is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), the best-selling Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, and has produced scholarly editions of a wide range of Edgeworth's writings. She is currently completing a political biography of Edgeworth. This will be the first account of Edgeworth's life to appear in the last 45 years. It will provide a new assessment of Edgeworth's intellectual and political life, looking at her milieux, correspondences, allegiances, interventions, and influence. Edgeworth's sustained engagements with debates about Ireland, about slavery and about women will form a major part of the story told in this biography. In 2019, Susan made a radio documentary about Edgeworth, ‘A Radical Life’ which aired on RTÉ Lyric FM in May 2019 and re-aired in May 2020. You can hear it here. As part of Susan’s research for her new political biography of Maria Edgeworth, she has been looking at Edgeworth’s attitude towards West Indian and especially Jamaican slavery in the early nineteenth century. Edgeworth’s fictions and plays often figured emancipated African and Creole characters: for instance, her celebrated novel, Belinda (1801) – originally entitled Abroad and At Home – features two such characters. The extent and nature of Edgeworth’s personal knowledge of and implication with the West Indies, however, has never been fully established before.

Educated in Ireland and America, Aileen Douglas holds a PhD from Princeton University. She began her academic career in the States, teaching at Washington University in St. Louis for five years before returning to Trinity to take up a position in the School of English. Her research interests focus on the writing of the long eighteenth century. In her monographs, 'Work in Hand: Print, Script, and Writing, 1690-1820' (OUP 2017) and 'Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body' (Chicago 1996) she explores aspects of embodiment, materiality, and literary representation. She also has a particular interest in Irish writing and writing by women. Aileen Douglas is a General Editor of the IRC-supported Early Irish Fiction 1690-1820 series (Four Courts, 2011-) and has co-edited two volumes for the series. Her co-edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield for the Cambridge Collected Works of Goldsmith is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2024.

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

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews)

A lunchtime 'in conversation' event on April 4th, 2023, featuring Rooney Writer Fellow Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe in conversation with Dr Sean Hewitt (School of English, TCD), organized by Trinity Long Room Hub.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. A finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award, it was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, National Poetry Day Recommendation, Shakespeare & Co. Year of Reading Selection, and a Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.

Seán Hewitt is a poet, writer and literary critic. Before joining Trinity, he held postdoctoral positions at University College Cork and at TCD, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Irish Research Council, respectively. His teaching and research interests are mainly focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and Irish literature. He also has an ongoing interest in the environmental humanities, and in studies of literature and science.

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

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe(Rooney Writer Fellow)

A lunchtime 'in conversation' event on March 28th, 2023, featuring Visiting Research Fellow Prof Dariusz Komorowski (University of Wroclaw) in conversation with Prof Jürgen Barkhoff (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, TCD). 

Dariusz Komorowski is a Professor of German Philology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Since 2005 he has been the Head of the Research Centre for German-Swiss Literature and since 2017 the co-originator and editor-in-chief of the online magazine “CH-Studien. Zeitschrift zu Literatur und Kultur aus der Schweiz” which he leads in cooperation with Anna Fattori (Rome) and Jan Jambor (Prešov). From 2012 to 2018 he was the Head of the postgraduate studies in “Cultural Management in the Cooperation of Regions of the European Union" at the University of Wroclaw. Dariusz Komorowski has conducted seminars and given lectures at the universities in Göttingen, Zurich and Maribor and organised several international seminars for master students in cooperation with those universities.

Jürgen Barkhoff is Professor of German (1776) and Head of Discipline in Germanic Studies. Before he was Vice-Provost/Chief Academic Officer and Deputy President of Trinity College Dublin. He teaches German literature and German and European Cultural History from 1750 to the present. His main research areas are literature and medicine, science and psychology around 1800, questions of identity in the German-speaking world and contemporary Swiss literature.

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

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Prof Dariusz Komorowski(University of Wroclaw).

Recorded April 20, 2023.

A lunchtime discussion featuring Professor Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape) in conversation with Professor Eve Patten (Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub). Professor Lalu will discuss his new book ‘Undoing Apartheid’, which he worked on while a visiting fellow at the Hub in 2019.

Premesh Lalu is the former Director of the DSI-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities of the Centre for Humanities Research. Following an MA from the University of the Western Cape, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Doctoral Fellowship to read towards a doctorate in History at the University of Minnesota. In 2003 he successfully defended a doctoral dissertation titled “In the Event of History”. After sixteen years in the Department of History as an Associate Professor, Lalu was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to convene a fellowship programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa. He was promoted to full professor upon being appointed as Director of the Centre for Humanities Research in 2008.

Eve Patten is Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. A scholar in nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish and British literature and cultural history, she is editor of the volume of essays, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and author of a monograph on representations of Ireland’s revolutionary decade in English writing, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is also co-PI on the Ireland’s Border Culture project, funded by the HEA Shared Island programme.

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

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Prof Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape)

Recorded April 25, 2023.

A lunchtime 'in conversation' event featuring Visiting Research Fellow Dr Roisín Higgins (Teesside University) in conversation with Dr Mark Hennessy (School of Natural Sciences, TCD), organised by the Long Room Hub.

Roisín Higgins is an Associate Professor at Teesside University with a research focus on historical memory. Her book on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising (Cork, 2012), won the ACIS James Donnelly Sr Prize for History and Social Science. Roisín was involved in many aspects of the Centenary of the Easter Rising, including acting as historical consultant on the ‘Commemoration’ zone of the permanent exhibition GPO: Witness History. Her wide-ranging public-facing work also includes the popular RTÉ programme National Treasures.

Roisín’s current work explores sensory experiences of living through the recent conflict in Northern Ireland. In 2021-2, she received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her project ‘Sensing the Troubles: A Critical Re-Imaging of Life in Northern Ireland’. She is currently the recipient of an AHRC Networking Grant for ‘Towards a Socio-Somatic History of the Troubles’, which brings together scholars, arts practitioners and community organisers to explore the impact of society on the body.

While at the Hub, Roisin will be collaborating with scholars whose work reframes stories of post-war Ireland, under the ‘Making Ireland’ theme. Through her project, ‘Fragments of Conflict: A Sensory History of the Troubles, she will explore new methodologies for writing histories of Ireland.


Mark Hennessy is Assistant Professor in Geography and Convenor of Trinity’s Making Ireland research theme. He holds a B.A.(Hons.) and Ph.D. from the Department of Geography, University College Dublin. In 1984/'85 he was a Research Fellow in the Flinders University of South Australia. He was a Research Assistant in the Departments of Geography and the Medieval History in 1985-1987 and Lecturer in Geography in UCD from 1987-1991. Hennessy then became a Lecturer in Geography in Trinity, before taking up his appointment as Assistant Professor in Geography.

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

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Roisín Higgins (Teesside University)

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/ 


Download

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'

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.

TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Roisín Higgins (Teesside University)

TLRHub

Related tracks