Dates: Ten weekly lectures on Tuesdays from 20 January 2026 to 07 April 2026.
Time: 19:00 to 20:00
Location: Jonathan Swift Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Tickets: Tickets are available via Eventbrite (guaranteed) and at the door (if available). Please book via the Eventbrite link here.
Fee: €50 for the entire series. Individual lectures are €5 each. Concessionary rates for the full series will be €40 or individual lecture €4 each. The concessionary rate applies to: students, OAPs, unemployed, groups of 20+, TCD staff and Graduates.
Description:
The author La Rochefoucauld once wrote that many people would never have fallen in love in their lives if they had never heard other people talk about love. And for centuries, it was literature, first and foremost, that talked to people about love: what love was, how it affected people, what its promises and dangers were, and how this strong affection should best be navigated. In some cases, literature also allowed lovers to bond in the first place, for example, quite notoriously, when young people read poems together. The lecture series will investigate the literary history of an intense and complicated feeling.
Schedule:
There will be ten weekly lectures beginning on Tuesday 20 January 2026.
- 20 January 2026 - Alice Jorgensen: Love Before Romance: Love Between Men and Women in Old English
- 27 January 2026 - Brendan O’Connell: Faking It: Chaucerian Mimicry in The Court of Love
- 3 February 2026 - Mark Sweetnam: ‘Love Is Not Love’ - Or Is It?: Divine and Human Love in the Poetry of John Donne
- 10 February 2026 - Nicholas Grene: Romcoms from Much Ado to Pride and Prejudice
- 17 February 2026 - Darryl Jones: ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’: The Queer Edwardians
- 24 February - Sinéad Moriarty: Belonging: Place Attachment in Contemporary Irish Environmental Picturebooks
- 3 March 2026 - Reading Week - No Lecture
- 10 March 2026 - Jane Carroll: Love, Friendship, and Fetish in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
- 24 March 202 - Jarlath Killeen: The Popular Romance
- 31 March 2026 - Julie Bates: ‘Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness’: Samuel Beckett’s Marriages
- 7 April 2026 - Rosie Lavan: The Love Department: William Trevor and the Sad Facts of Love
Online/Video Recordings of Lectures
The lectures will take place live in the Jonathan Swift Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin. However they will also be recorded. If you purchased a ticket to a particular lecture, to several lectures, or to the entire series, you will be emailed a link to the video recording of the lecture or lectures as soon as these are available (usually the next day). The recordings will be available and watchable at any time until the end of the Evening Lecture series in May. We regret that it is not possible to livestream the lectures as they happen.
For further information on the School of English Lecture series please email Sophia Ní Sheoin at wilde@tcd.ie