Date: Thursday 19 March 2026
Time: 18.30 - 19.30
Location: Joly Lecture Theatre, Hamilton Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free. Please register for a ticket here on Eventbrite.
The 2026 Benedict Anderson Lecture
Spectres of Empire: Irish and Mongol "Marginal Imperialists" and the Afterlives of Imperial Nations.
The Benedict Anderson Lecture is an annual event jointly hosted by Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork. The lecture series was established to honour the life and intellectual legacy of Benedict Anderson, one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century and author of Imagined Communities - a work that transformed the study of nationalism and continues to shape scholarship across history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonial studies.
Conceived as a flagship intellectual occasion within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Benedict Anderson Lecture brings to Dublin and Cork distinguished scholars and public intellectuals whose work engages with themes central to Anderson’s scholarship: nationalism and political imagination; print capitalism and modernity; Southeast Asia and global intellectual history; exile, identity, and belonging.
Although Anderson spent much of his academic career at Cornell University and conducted extensive research across Southeast Asia, he consistently identified as Irish. Yet his stature as a major Irish intellectual has not always been fully recognised at home. This lecture seeks to address that absence - not merely by commemorating his name, but by fostering the kind of rigorous, internationally engaged scholarship that he exemplified.
As a jointly hosted initiative, the Benedict Anderson Lecture reflects a shared commitment between Trinity and University College Cork to collaboration across institutions and disciplines. Alternating annually between Dublin and Cork, the series strengthens connections within Irish academia while remaining outward-looking and globally engaged.
In keeping with Anderson’s own commitments, particular attention is given to inviting scholars from Asia and from the Global South, ensuring that the lecture remains international in scope and grounded in the regions and perspectives that mattered most to him.
The establishment of this lecture marks not only a tribute to a great Irish scholar, but also a statement about the intellectual culture we seek to sustain: historically informed, globally connected, and attentive to the political and cultural forces that continue to shape our world.
For 2026, the Inaugural Benedict Anderson Lecture at Trinity is hosted by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and organised by the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies.
Further information is available on the Eventbrite webpage here.
For further information please email the event organiser Dr Hongfei Wang at WANGH11@tcd.ie