News
14 Research Incentive Grants Awarded
Trinity Long Room Hub is delighted to announce the award of 46k in funding to researchers in its partner Schools.
Discover Research Dublin
Trinity College Dublin & the Royal Irish Academy have successfully coordinated a bid to host Ireland’s 2013 contribution to European Researchers’ Night, an annual event to raise public awareness of researchers and research careers across Europe.
On 27 September 2013, events and activities will be staged across the campus of Trinity College and the RIA on Dawson Street, as well as inside and outside the Trinity Long Room Hub, along with outdoor projections on buildings around the centre of Dublin.
The evening will be interactive and visitors can move from one engaging event to the next throughout the day and night, learning about astronomy, history, digital journalism, and much more! For more information, see the event website: http://discoverresearchdublin.com/ or follow updates on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ResearchDublin
Around the World Symposium
30 May 2013 - DARIAH-IE and DH@TCD, based in the Trinity Long Room Hub, took part in the Around the World Symposium on Technology and Culture on 30th May 2013.
The symposium, which was organised by the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Alberta, was live streamed for 24 hours, and featured panel discussions and presentations from Digital Humanities scholars based in 9 locations across the globe: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Japan, the UK, and The USA.
Here, at the Trinity Long Room Hub we had "an amazing panel set up" as the Kule Institute described it on their blog!
http://kuleinstitute.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/trinity-college-dublin-long-room-hub-has-an-amazing-panel-set-up-for-thursday-may-30/ which included Dr Sandra Collins, Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland, The Royal Irish Academy; Dr Owen Conlan, School of Computer Science and Statistics, TCD, and Coordinator of the CULTURA FP7 project; Mr. Anthony Corns, Technology Manager, The Discovery Programme; Catriona Crowe, Head of Special Projects, National Archives of Ireland; Dr Jennifer Edmond, Director of Strategic Projects, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, TCD and Coordinator of the CENDARI FP7 Project; Marie Wallace, Analytics Strategist, IBM. For further information visit http://storify.com/KIASAlberta/learning-from-uofaworld or http://dh.tcd.ie/dh/.
Launch of 17th century Down Survey of Ireland website
13 May 2013 - Congratulations to Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú and his colleagues in the School of Histories and Humanities, the Library, and the School of Computer Science and Statistics on the launch of an extraordinary website detailing the Down Survey of Ireland. The Down Survey of Ireland, undertaken by the Cromwellian regime in the years 1656-1658, introduced modern mapping techniques into Ireland creating the first recognizable maps of the country. It also was the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world and measured all the estates to be forfeited by Catholic landowners. This Project has brought together for the first time in over 300 years all the surviving maps from the survey from dozens of libraries and archives throughout Ireland and Britain, as well as in the National Library of France, digitised them and made them available as a public online resource.
Speaking at the launch in the Trinity Long Room Hub by UCC Professor William J Smyth, co-editor of the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, and by Ed Parsons, Chief Geospatial Technologist at Google, Dr Ó Siochrú said: "The bringing together of this highly detailed map collection and related contemporaneous material with the aid of GIS technology allows us to reconstruct this period of Irish history. It will be of great interest to historians, genealogists, sociologists, engineers and anyone with an interest in Ireland, its past and its people. Preliminary research based on on-going work suggests that our understanding of the scale and timing of the massive transfer of land from Catholic to Protestant landholders will need to be reassessed."
This Project reflects Trinity's leaderhship role in the Digital Humanities and builds on another unprecedented online resource launched in 2010 with which Dr Ó Siochrú was also pivotally involved on the 1641 Depositions. This is a fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at the Trinity Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641.
A recording of the launch is available below.
For further information and media coverage on the Down Survey of Ireland launch visit: http://www.tcd.ie/Communications/news/pressreleases/pressRelease.php?headerID=3076&pressReleaseArchive=2013
'The End of Normal: Disability, Diversity and Neoliberalism', a fascinating lecture by Professor Lennard Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago
8 May 2013 - “Normal” seems to be ending its tyrannical reign over bodies, particularly identities. Instead, it has been replaced by “diversity.” Yet the one area that “normal” reigns supreme is in the realm of disability. These were the issues explored by Prof Davis in his lecture as he tried to account for this discrepancy by considering aspects of life under neoliberalism.
Lennard J. Davis, Professor of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, delivered his lecture as part of the M.Sc. in Disability Studies Public Lecture Series 2012-13 which was organised in collaboration with the Centre for Deaf Studies and the School of English at TCD. The Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub was delighted to chair the lecture given the relevance of this topic to Trinity's new research theme on identities in transformation recently launched by the President of Ireland.
The full text of Prof Davis's speech can be read here.
President of Ireland launches Trinity Long Room Hub's new Research Theme on Identities in Transformation
24 April 2013 - President Michael D. Higgins launched a major new research theme for Trinity College Dublin at its flagship arts and humanities research institute, the Trinity Long Room Hub.
Identities in Transformation is a new overarching research focus for Trinity College led by the Trinity Long Room Hub, forming one of Trinity’s 19 strategic multi-disciplinary research areas. These are research fields in which TCD has a critical mass of world-class researchers, and which have the scale, resources and ability to address important research challenges with considerable social, cultural and economic impact.
At its launch, Prof Juergen Barkhoff, the Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub and theme convener, explained what is meant by identity:
“A sense of who we are, what has shaped us, what values we hold, and what drives us, is, in fact, something deeply rooted and very personal. It has its origins in the way family history and national history relate, but also in stories, in public myth and popular imagination. These are the seeds from which many of our convictions and attitudes grow, and as such they are a particularly important and a rich field of investigation.”
“A clear understanding of identity, both on the level of the individual and the collective, contributes to a strong sense of self and to active and responsible citizenship, especially in times of rapid change and disorientation. In a period of globalisation, migration as well as increasingly individualised lifestyle choices, research in this area has particular relevance.”
“The new research theme Identities in Transformation will undertake a multi-faceted exploration of the memories and stories that contribute to a sense of identity within Ireland and within Europe, especially where these are contested memories. The results of this research will be most valuable for the discussions about the future of Irish society. It will also enable us to relate with more openness and insight to other cultures and will allow us to position ourselves as a nation with more confidence and a better understanding of the choices we have in a changing European and global landscape.”
As part of ongoing research being conducted in this area, an international research consortium led by Trinity College Dublin has just been awarded over half a million euro in funding from the European Commission. The global research network Spectress, led by Trinity, is investigating how national identities are disrupted by the traumas of history and how societies and nations reshape their collective identities after political and cultural traumas such as war, civil war, genocide, occupation or economic crash. The network includes cutting edge global researchers from Yale, the University of Tokyo, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the University of Sao Paulo as well as from leading institutions in Croatia, Estonia, Germany and Poland. It will offer research fellowships for senior researchers as well as for doctoral students at the participating institutions and will bring the research teams together for five thematic conferences. In Trinity College it is led by Dr Jennifer Edmond and includes researchers from across the partner Schools of the Trinity Long Room Hub.
Over 70 researchers and their postgraduate research students across 10 of the 24 Schools in Trinity are actively involved in this research theme. They represent and bring together fields as varied as History, Classics, Art History, Music, Drama and Film Studies, English and Irish Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Health Sciences, Theology, Peace Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology and Neuroscience.
The full text of the President's speech can be viewed here.
CENDARI Summer School: Historical Sources & Transnational Approaches to European History
The CENDARI project, a European research project coordinated by TCD and based in the Trinity Long Room Hub, will host the first of three annual Summer Schools in Florence, Italy from the 22nd to the 26th July 2013. The School is being organised by CENDARI in collaboration with the COST Action: IS 1005, ‘Medioevo Europeo: Medieval Studies and Technological Resources’. The Summer School, entitled Historical Sources & Transnational Approaches to European History, will invite participants to address specifically how CENDARI aims to resolve the difficulties of historical research through the application of digital technologies and methods. For more information and to apply before the 15th April 2013, please visit http://www.cendari.eu/news-events/summer-school-2013/.
Sessions will apply the concept of ‘transnational moments’ to examine ways in which historical research is complicated by the nature of material records of the past. The Summer School will provide a context for the various collections-level challenges to transnational history, such as how to identify sources that have become ‘hidden’ or lost through accidents of history. Researchers will examine the linguistic, quantitative and methodological challenges facing them today.
The five-day programme, which is currently being finalised, will be a combination of expert speakers, hands-on sessions and collaborative design workshops. All attendees at the Summer School will be invited to present their own research questions and will learn about the digital methods and tools that can be applied. Participants will present their own work and receive feedback from peers; attend seminars by leading authorities in transnational modern and medieval European history, as well as in Digital Humanities; deepen their understanding of the impact of the material record on the practice of history; gain familiarity with powerful new tools in research-oriented information technology.
Applications are invited from historians and collections experts working within the CENDARI case study areas of the First World War and Medieval European Culture, as well as researchers working in the digital humanities who wish to sharpen their understanding of these vital research questions. A number of bursaries, varying in value, funded by the CENDARI project and by the COST Action: IS1005, are available for participants.
For more information on the CENDARI project, financed by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), please visit www.cendari.eu. For more information on the COST Action IS 1005, please visit www.medioevoeuropeo.eu.
''Euro-Visions', a new public lecture series on Europe to mark Ireland's Presidency of the European Union is launched'
From January to June 2013 Ireland will hold the presidency of the European Union, and 2013 also marks the 40th anniversary of Ireland's accession to the then EEC. Trinity College Dublin is marking this momentous period with a public lecture series jointly organised by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and the Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS), the two research institutes of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Euro-Visions lecture series will bring together Irish and international scholars from across a wide range of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. It will interrogate the current crisis of the EU from the vantage points of both the Social Sciences and the Humanities and will instigate an interdisciplinary dialogue about possible responses to this crisis. It will combine political, sociological, historical and cultural perspectives to reflect on a range of issues such as questions of identity and cultural memory within Europe, links between the past and the present, and social, political and financial models for the EU. Overall, the series will present fresh perspectives from experts across a broad spectrum of disciplines and positions towards the crucial debate about the future of Europe and Ireland's position and role within the EU.
An associated event of the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU, the lecture series will run from January to June and will (normally) take place on Wednesdays at 18.15 in the Neill/Hoey Theatre in the Trinity Long Room Hub. Visit the following links for ABSTRACTS and the PRINTED PROGRAMME.
CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowships
Call for 2013 Fellows
CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) invites applications for its Visiting Research Fellowship Programme for 2013. The fellowships are being funded through the CENDARI project by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research.
Visiting Research Fellowships are available in the following CENDARI partner institutions
- Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- King’s College London, UK
- National Library of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic
- University of Goettingen, Germany
- University of Stuttgart and Bibliothek fuer Zeitgeschichte, Germany
Two Fellowships in each institution will be awarded, on a competitive basis. These fellowships, which include a stipend for living expenses and travel to and from the host institution, will provide researchers with access to nationally and internationally significant archival collections and specialist knowledge in the two broad thematic areas piloted by CENDARI:
- The First World War
- Medieval European Culture
For more information and to download the information and application form, please go to http://www.cendari.eu/visiting-research-fellowships-2013. The closing date for receipt of applications is 12th December 2012. All applications should be sent by email to info@cendari.eu with the title “CENDARI Fellowship 2013” in the email title line.
The CENDARI project is funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research 
'Major three day conference on Biopolitics, Society and Performance Conference includes public lecture by renowed cultural theorist, Giorgio Agamben'
Oct 31, 2012
The renowned philosopher and cultural theorist from Italy, Giorgio Agamben, gave a public keynote address as part of a major three-day conference, “Biopolitics, Society and Performance” organised by the School of Drama, Film and Music and co-hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute from October 31st to November 2nd. Agamben's keynote address was entitled “The Archaeology of the Work of Art”.
The Italian philosopher and author is widely known for his criticism of the "War on Terror" and for developing such concepts as “Homo Sacer,” someone who can be killed with impunity because he is regarded as worthless by the state, and “State of Exception,” whereby the state determines who is worthy of living. He also caused a sensation when he refused to travel to the USA to give a lecture in 2004 because of having to give up his biometric information, which he regarded as equivalent to being tattooed by the Nazis.
The author was joined at the conference by other world leading participants who gave keynote addresses. They included the sociologist, Thomas Lemke from Germany, who opened the conference with his talk “Biopolitics: Current Issues and Future Challenges”, and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti from the Netherlands who gave a talk “What is ‘Human about the Humanities Today?’”
The conference theme of "biopolitics" addressed a major concern today about how life is being regulated, tackling such diverse topics as CCTV surveillance cameras, the rights of asylum seekers, the prevention of AIDs, environmental controls, organ transplantation, genetic modification, and stem cell research among other issues. The conference aimed to reconsider the notion of biopolitics and its recent transformations in theory and the contemporary world.
The term biopolitics was first defined by Michel Foucault in his book The Will to Knowledge. For Foucault, biopolitics means the technologies of political power that allow for the control of the human population as a biological species. Biopolitics has become a highly controversial philosophical concept today. Giorgio Agamben relates the term to the legislative aspects of power and the emergence of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. For Agamben the inclusion of “bare life” in the political realm constitutes the original nucleus of sovereign power. Thus, the political system has the power to decide not only who deserves to have “human rights”, but also which life counts as “human” and worth living.
Many contemporary artists are concerned with the implications of biopolitics. Their work attempts to expose the control mechanisms that affect human behaviour and limit human rights, while exploring bioethical questions in relation to human tissue and genetic modification.
'A Family at War: The Diary of Mary Martin' - Digitised Diary of Mother of First World War Soldier is Launched
Oct 2, 2012
A digitised and transcribed diary, candid and often poignant insight into life for families of Irish soldiers during the First World War was recently launched by Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan TD, in the Trinity Long Room Hub on October 2nd. Written in 1916, a turbulent year in Irish history, the Diary is an account of daily life written by a mother whose son had been reported missing in action. http://dh.tcd.ie/martindiary/. See coverage of the launch in the Irish Times and on RTE News. The diary is an online resource developed and produced by students on Trinity College Dublin's M Phil in Digital Humanities and Culture and the PRTLI V Digital Arts and Humanities PhD, using a manuscript treasure from the collections of the National Library of Ireland.
'Man Amidst InHumanity' Conference on Raoul Wallenberg
Sep 12, 2012
Minister Alan Shatter in his opening remarks at the the first academic conference on Raoul Wallenberg in Ireland described the conference as an act of memory and emphasized the significance of its moral dimension. The conference in Trinity Long Room Hub was organized jointly by the Hungarian, Israeli and Swedish Embassies and Trinity's Centre for European Studies to mark the centennial of the birth of the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary.
6.5 million euro awarded to Trinity led international collaboration to enable cutting edge research in medieval and modern European history
The project, CENDARI (Collaborative EuropeaN Digital ARchive Infrastructure), is coordinated by Dr Jennifer Edmond of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and includes collaborative partners in archives, libraries and universities in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Serbia and Netherlands.
The project focuses on two pilot areas of research: The First World War, a pan-European conflict which led to the dispersal of archives across national borders, all but preventing the rise of any truly comparative approach to its history, and the medieval era, crucible of modern Europe. CENDARI will see technical experts join forces with leading historians and archivists to create a widely applicable digital infrastructure of the highest quality. It will allow scholars unprecedented visibility over primary archival materials, from illuminated medieval gospels to propaganda leaflets dropped over Germany in 1917. It will also offer huge flexibility in the organisation and visualisation of these materials, prompting new research methods and answers to previously unanswered questions.
By integrating and enhancing a huge variety of data and sources into a central research infrastructure, CENDARI will provide a model that is not only relevant for historical data, but also for other scientific fields, such as biomedical images and environmental data.
A champion of the Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Jennifer Edmond in commenting on the significance of the project said: “Projects like CENDARI not only push the barriers of what e-infrastructures are able to do, but they also bring new users into the Digital Humanities community. The project will introduce skills necessary to the next generation of young researchers, drawing young people into advanced study of history. As the data it contains will be easy to adapt for public audiences, CENDARI will also give all citizens a platform to expand their understanding of their place within the European Community.”
New Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Appointed
Jul 04, 2012
Professor Jürgen Barkhoff has been appointed as new Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub,Trinity College Dublin’s Arts & Humanities Research Institute. He is a Professor of German and specialist in German Literature and Culture in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. As Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, he will lead its development as a unique resource to foster and support innovative interdisciplinary research in the Arts & Humanities and to connect academic research with public debate.
Speaking about his new position, Professor Barkhoff said: “The Arts & Humanities are fundamental for understanding who we are and where we come from, and they also help us to shape our future. They analyse the self-representation of cultures and societies and enable us to understand processes of identity formation. In Trinity College the Arts & Humanities are at the centre of the University and have a proud and distinguished history of scholarship. The impressive results in the recent QS World University Subject Rankings have just again underlined our world-class standing in this field”.
“The Trinity Long Room Hub has enormous potential to enhance the excellence of our Arts & Humanities research, to open opportunities for wider cross-disciplinary research collaborations and to showcase the relevance of the Arts & Humanities for today’s societies. I am looking forward to working with our Schools and the other stakeholders to realise this potential and make the Trinity Long Room Hub a vibrant place for advanced research and debate and a beacon for the Arts & Humanities,” he said.
The Trinity Long Room Hub involves the Library and seven academic schools. These schools are the School of Drama, Film and Music, the School of English, the School of Histories and Humanities, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, the School of Religions, Theology and Ecumenics, and the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy.
Professor Barkhoff is an internationally renowned scholar with a strong focus on interdisciplinary research. His main research is in the fields of Medical Humanities (medicine, psychology and literature), Environmental Humanities (nature writing and eco-literature) and questions of identity and culture in Europe. He was appointed to a lectureship in German and European Studies in Trinity College in 1995 after a Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut) in Essen/Germany. He was Director of the Centre for European Studies (2002-2005) and Registrar of the College 2007-2011. Recent publications include: ed. (with Helmut Eberhardt): Networking across Borders and Frontiers. Demarcation and Connectedness in European Culture and Society (2009); ed. (with Valerie Heffernan)Schweiz schreiben. ZuKonstruktion und Dekonstruktion des Mythos Schweiz in der Gegenwartsliteratur [On the construction of Swiss national myths in literature] (2010); ed. (with Dietrich von Engelhardt) Körperkult - Körperzwang - Körperstörung im Spiegel von Psychopathologie, Literatur und Kultur [cult of the body – pathology of the body in psychopathology, literature and culture] (2010).
Funding Bodies
