Welcome to the School of English.

 

It is always a genuine pleasure to welcome anyone to the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin. It is a pleasure not only for simple hospitality's sake; there is also a personal pleasure, in that a welcome reminds me of how fortunate I am to be teaching English here - and I am sure that this is something that all of my colleagues share. When teaching English in Trinity, it is impossible not to be aware that this is the university of Edmund Burke, of Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, J.M. Synge and Samuel Beckett; that more recently our graduates include many leading Irish poets and novelists, ranging from the Booker Prize-winning Anne Enright to some of the most exciting crime fiction novelists writing today, such as John Connolly. Teaching English in a university with this living heritage confers a certain responsibility - and this is something we all feel, and take seriously. Today, the School of English at Trinity is the highest-ranked English department in Ireland; it is the 9th-ranking English department in Europe, and 32nd in the world. We offer courses across the full range of the discipline, spanning the discipline from Old Norse to novels written in the past year, and the School is home to a dynamic community of more than eighty PhD students whose interests are similarly wide-ranging. Our teaching and research draws upon the world class collections in the Trinity College Dublin Library, and this has to some extent shaped our research and teaching, with special concentrations in Irish studies, children's literature, popular fiction, medieval studies, and American literature, while our highly regarded programmes in creative writing are housed in the building in which Oscar Wilde was born.