Supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family
The Annual Edmund Burke Lectures
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1748. As a student he founded what would later become the College Historical Society, the oldest student society in the world. Burke entered Parliament in 1765 and quickly became a champion for political emancipation. After 1789, he directed his attention to the French Revolution and its immediate ramifications for political stability in England. To mark the university’s deep and lasting connection, and to express the inspiration his life and work as a public intellectual offer to us, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute has instituted a prestigious annual Edmund Burke lecture, delivered by a leading public intellectual of our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us today.
One of Burke’s central and life-long concerns was what moral codes should underpin the social order, constrain the use of power and inform our behaviour as responsible citizens. This is as important today as it was in Burke’s time, and the Edmund Burke lectures will keep his manifold legacies alive by providing a prominent forum for contributing in his spirit to the wider discourse about what society we want to live in and what traditions, perspectives and values we need to draw on in the shaping of our future.
| Lecture Series | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Democracy & the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence | A public lecture by Professor Michael Ignatieff. | |
| 2019 | The Future of Ireland: Human Rights and Children’s Rights | A public lecture by Professor Mary McAleese. | |
| 2018 | He Who Did Nothing: The Poet as Citizen | A public lecture by Paul Muldoon. | |
| 2017 | Sometimes it Matters who is in Power | A public lecture by Professor Margaret MacMillan. | |
| 2016 | From the Frontline: An Eyewitness Account from the Middle East | A public lecture by writer and journalist Robert Fisk. | |
| 2015 | "An Inheritance from our Forefathers?" Historians and the Memory of the Irish Revolution | A public lecture by Prof Roy Foster (Carroll Chair of Irish History, University of Oxford, and Visiting Parnell Fellow, Magdalene College, Cambridge). | Read More |
| 2014 | What would Edmund Burke think of Human Rights? | A public lecture by Baroness Onora O'Neill of Bengarve CH CBE FBA. | Read More |
