Medical & Health Humanities Initiative
The Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities Initiative brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, drama, health sciences, religion, cultural studies, arts, literature and languages.
Medical and health humanities seeks to provide insights into the cultural and social contexts within which diverse but interrelated concerns such as the human condition, the individual experience of illness and suffering, and the way medicine is (or was) practiced, might be understood.
The mission statement of the Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities initiative:
To cultivate a richer understanding of the interactions and synergies between practices and discourses of wellness, health or medicine and the arts, humanities or culture through interdisciplinary research and education.
Environmental Humanities
The Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH) aims to create a centre of global consequence by pursuing major research questions in a collaborative environment. It believes that the humanities are an indispensable resource for how we live with environmental change. Humanities knowledge is increasingly important for a globalizing world where religion, media, narrative, myth and culture play an ever larger role in economies and world affairs.
CEH is based in the School of Histories and Humanities and offers a dedicated environmental humanities research space that facilitates inter-disciplinary methodological approaches. It provides high-spec digital hardware and specialized software, as well as access to a global research network. We welcome short and long term visiting fellows, as well as graduate students.
Cultural Trauma
In 2014, the Trinity Long Room Hub launched the SPECTRESS network which is led by Dr Jennifer Edmond. Funded by the Marie Skłowdowska Curie International Research Exchange Scheme, the Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and the Reestablishing of Solid Sovereignties (or SPECTRESS) project is a network of nine international university partners that has been funded by the European Commission to undertake a four year programme of scholarly exchanges focussed on the concept of ‘cultural trauma’ and national identities. The project is unique in a number of ways: first of all, it is global in the scale of its collaboration, a rarity among projects of this type, which are more commonly framed by a national or regional context. Second of all, we propose not only to look at societies assimilating trauma, but more specifically also at the way in which the arts and culture reveal and assist in this process. As such, we hope to contribute to the growing evidence base for the true value of the arts, culture and heritage to societies undergoing deep and traumatic stress.
Finally, SPECTRESS will directly address the question of how we, as an international network of scholars, are able to communicate most effectively across languages and cultural spaces about our findings, by investigating innovative technological approaches able to connect our ideas within and from our native languages, rather than always via the academic vehicular language of English.
