A warm welcome back to friends and colleagues from everyone at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Those of you on campus will have seen that the Hub building is currently covered in scaffolding as we undergo repairs to the façade, but rest assured, we are fully open and very much in business. Conferences and seminars have started, our Early Career Researchers are back at their desks on the fourth floor, and our programme of events is filling up fast.
Here are just a few early Michaelmas term highlights for your diaries:
- A new Human+ Tech Talks series commences on 13th September. Professor Vincent Wade from Adapt will host the first roundtable with Professor Linda Hogan and Dave Lewis examining the ethical dimension of human-centred AI. Click here for details.
- For Culture Night, 23rd September, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies and the School of English will host ‘Terry Pratchett at the Unseen University: A Culture Night Neurohumanities Event’, drawing on Pratchett’s own experience to discuss our current understanding of Alzheimer's Disease and related conditions.
- On the evening of 27th September we partner with the Centre for Resistance Studies to continue our signature ‘Literature and Resistance’ lecture series. Ankhi Mukherjee, Oxford Professor of English and World Literatures,will be in conversation with Trinity neuroscientist Ian Robertson about her new book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor.
- On 30th September, we’re participating in European Researcher Night with Adapt hosting a Think-In on AI with our Human+ fellows, and several other lively research events planned.
- And on Thursday 6th October, the Hub will proudly host our annual Edmund Burke Lecture – returning after a two-year pandemic break – when the distinguished historian, former politician and public intellectual Michael Ignatieff will engage with Burke’s writings to consider ‘Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence’, a pertinent topic in the light of recent world events.
With lockdowns behind us we are delighted to have a full cohort of international visiting research fellows ready to join us over the coming year. Frank Rexroth is here from the University of Göttingen to work with Trinity’s School of Histories and Humanities on a project entitled ‘Towards a New Typology of “Higher” Knowledge in the Twelfth Century: Scholasticism and the Emergence of Experts and Intellectuals’. Emily Monty has arrived to take up the Fagel Collection Visiting Research Fellowship, in association with the College Library, to research ‘Composite Chorography: Collecting the Americas in the Fagel Collection in the Library of Trinity College Dublin’. Later in the semester, Mary Burke, who is based at the University of Connecticut, will be working with Trinity’s School of English on her Hub project, ‘Bohemian Ireland’, which explores post-war Ireland’s dispersed, creative, and colourful expatriate scene.
As always, our TLRH community can look forward to a rich schedule of research seminars and public humanities events, including our celebrated Behind the Headlines panel discussions, a ground-breaking new podcast series from the Schuler Democracy Forum, and a special series to mark fifty years of Ireland’s membership of the European Union. For these and many other research-related activities, keep an eye on our website and regular newsletter - we look forward to seeing you. And as the new academic session opens, full of promise and optimism, our best wishes to you all for a happy and successful year.
Professor Eve Patten, Director
What do we do in the Trinity Long Room Hub?
Welcome to the website of the Trinity Long Room Hub, the Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin.
The Trinity Long Room Hub is a community of scholars drawn from over twenty disciplines dedicated to advancing Trinity College Dublin’s rich tradition of research excellence in the Arts and Humanities, a tradition that goes back 400 years. Our constituent partners include: the Library and the Schools of Creative Arts; Education; English; Histories and Humanities; Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies; Law; Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences; Religion; and the Department of Philosophy.
In 2020 the Trinity Long Room Hub celebrated the tenth anniversary of the opening of its now iconic building in Trinity College Dublin. In that period the Hub has become ‘a significant player internationally’, in the words of the 2017 official review of the institute. Despite a very challenging year for the world and our research community due to the global health pandemic, we remain ambitious for the next ten years. We want to build on our success by continuing to support collaboration, interdisciplinarity and excellence in scholarship while reinforcing the profile and voice of the Arts and the Humanities in all of our lives.
In the section below, you will see examples of what we do and can find out more about how to participate in our activities and support our researchers.
For advanced and early career researchers looking for opportunities and supports:
We offer to the researchers in our member schools a supportive environment for research projects and activities, including a fellowship programme that brings them into intensive dialogue with the best of their respective fields internationally. Despite the barriers posed by the global health pandemic in 2020, we continue to build these important links with scholars all over the world. For more on our short-term Visiting Research Programme, visit our research pages here.
We provide career transforming residencies for some of our Schools’ early career researchers. Since 2010, we have hosted 270 early career researchers from over 25 countries. For more information on these talented scholars and their diverse research interests visit here.
For funders, researchers and entrepreneurs interested in innovative collaboration:
We support a wide range of collaborative research initiatives which position the human at the centre of measures to tackle complex societal challenges. We are committed to finding ways in which Arts and Humanities research insights can reach the people who need it most, be that policy makers, the public or enterprise. Projects such as Human+ (Enhancing Human Experience in Technological Innovation); The Schuler Democracy Forum and Shape-ID (Shaping Inter-disciplinary practices in Europe), showcase the pioneering scholarly, interdisciplinary and digital research approach we take here in Trinity, bringing in numerous high-profile national and international partnerships.
For the members of the public and alumni interested in joining fascinating discussions:
We also run a major public humanities initiative, bringing the intellectual energy of Arts and Humanities research – and a human perspective -- to bear on the pressing social, cultural, legislative and technological issues of our time. Further to workshops, seminars and public lectures, (many of which are available to listen to here), our popular Behind the Headlines discussion series has gone from strength to strength. During Covid-19, we have extended the participation in these discussions enormously, reaching a wide international audience online, and creating new platforms, including our weekly Covid-19 Blog. International collaborations have flourished, as demonstrated in an important collaboration with Columbia’s Heyman Centre for the Humanities on ‘Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic.’ For more on our public events, click here or sign up to our newsletter here.
