Recorded April 22, 2025.

A lecture by Dr Eilís Smyth (School of English, TCD) as part of the English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series.

English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series is a fortnightly meeting which has been integral to the School of English research community since the 1990s. The aim of the seminar series is to provide a relaxed and convivial atmosphere for staff and students to present their research to their peers. The series also welcomes distinguished guest lecturers from the academic community outside Trinity College to present on their work. It is a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and engage with the diverse research taking place within the School. 

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded May 12th, 2025.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Annual Humanities Horizons Lecture for 2025 was delivered by Bruce Shapiro, on "The Spectacle of Fearsome Acts": Violence, Journalism and the Democratic Future.

Are today’s journalists the unwitting enablers of autocrats or the last bastion of democratic defence? Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, reflects on how stories get told amid sweeping catastrophes and surging authoritarianism.

The Annual Humanities Horizons Lecture was established in 2013 to provide a significant contribution to reflection on and advocacy for the Arts and Humanities.

About Bruce Shapiro

Bruce Shapiro is Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of Columbia Journalism School, encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide.

An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He also teaches ethics at Columbia Journalism School, where he is adjunct professor and Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs. His books include Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America and Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future.

Shapiro is recipient of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies award for "outstanding and fundamental contributions to the social understanding of trauma." He is a founding board member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 21st 2025.

The annual seminar for the CONUL Teaching and Learning Committee organised by Trinity Library and with a keynote by Dr. John Danaher (School of Law, University of Galway).

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 25th, 2025.

A lecture by Dr James Wood (University of East Anglia) as part of the English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series.

English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series is a fortnightly meeting which has been integral to the School of English research community since the 1990s. The aim of the seminar series is to provide a relaxed and convivial atmosphere for staff and students to present their research to their peers. The series also welcomes distinguished guest lecturers from the academic community outside Trinity College to present on their work. It is a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and engage with the diverse research taking place within the School. 

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 14th, 2025.

A lecture by Dr Sanjoy Som (scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, USA) organised by Trinity's MPhil in Identities & Cultures of Europe and funded by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.

Come and listen to an astrobiologist working at NASA on how space exploration can reshape human identity in times of crisis. This event explores the relationship between space exploration and human identity in the context of the climate emergency, the new (commercial) space age and the highly unpredictable state of world politics. Dr Sanjoy Som, a scientist based at NASA’s Ames Research Center (California, USA), will delve into this topic in a public lecture, reflecting on how enhanced awareness of the Earth's interconnections with biology and the human civilization it hosts, the vastness of space to which the Earth system belongs, and the depth in time that has led to the present moment can create a sense of identity that can be as strong as cultural identities.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded April 8th, 2025.

A lecture by Dr Dilek Ozturk & Dr Elliott Mills (School of English, TCD) as part of the English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series.

This weeks seminar will cover two lecture: Revisiting Brian Friel: Space, Place, and Text & ‘I always make a point of following the works of Mr Eliot’: T.S. Eliot in Flann O’Brien’s Undecidable Modernism.

English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series is a fortnightly meeting which has been integral to the School of English research community since the 1990s. The aim of the seminar series is to provide a relaxed and convivial atmosphere for staff and students to present their research to their peers. The series also welcomes distinguished guest lecturers from the academic community outside Trinity College to present on their work. It is a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and engage with the diverse research taking place within the School. 

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded April 9th, 2025.

A discussion between Prof Chris Morash (English) and Dr Mark O'Connell (Author and Rooney Writer Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub) organised by the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Professor Chris Morash, Trinity’s Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing, and prize-winning author Dr Mark O’Connell discuss on the writing of John Banville. This event coincides with the inclusion of works from Banville’s archive, housed in Trinity, in the current exhibition in the Old Library Long Room. On display in the exhibition is the manuscript draft of The Singularities (2022), which – differing from the published text - concludes with the line “at the last inscribe a full, and infinitely full, full stop.”

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 20th, 2025.

Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Dr Nina Lamal (Huygens Instituut, KNAW, Netherlands) in conversation with Dr Ann-Marie Hansen (Fagel Collection Project Manager, Library, TCD).

Bio:

Dr Nina Lamal is an early modern historian based at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. Her research focuses on early modern political history, diplomacy, the transnational histories of the book, and digital humanities.

She studied early modern history at the KU Leuven. In 2014, she received her PhD from the KU Leuven and St Andrews University for her thesis on Italian news reports, political debates and historical writing on the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566-1648). Her book Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries was published with Brill in 2023.

From 2015-2017, Lamal worked as postdoctoral research assistant at the Universal Short Title Catalogue project (university of St Andrews). In 2017, she moved to the university of Antwerp, after she had obtained a three-year individual postdoctoral fellowship of the Flemish Research Council. From 2020-2024, she was postdoctoral researcher on project Inventing Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe and editor of the of the correspondence of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. (https://suriano.huygens.knaw.nl/).

Apart from the digital scholarly edition of Suriano’s letters, her most recent publications include a co-written article with Helmer Helmers on Dutch diplomacy in the seventeenth century, two journal articles: one on foreign powers influencing the first Italian newspapers, and one the role of cross-border printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Low Countries.

As a Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow, she will examine how the Fagel library functioned as a tool of statecraft from the Fagel regent family in the eighteenth century. Drawing on recent digitization and cataloguing projects, the proposed research use book historical methods to bring the library into dialogue with the Fagel Archives in The Hague and to study how it was used for political education, referencing and networking.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 11th, 2025.

A lecture by Prof Jarlath Killeen (School of English, TCD) as part of the English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series.

English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series is a fortnightly meeting which has been integral to the School of English research community since the 1990s. The aim of the seminar series is to provide a relaxed and convivial atmosphere for staff and students to present their research to their peers. The series also welcomes distinguished guest lecturers from the academic community outside Trinity College to present on their work. It is a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and engage with the diverse research taking place within the School. 

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded March 11th, 2025.

A lecture by Fergus Sheil (Founding Artistic Director of Irish National Opera) for the Music Composition Centre Talks.

Fergus is the founding artistic director of Irish National Opera. He has conducted a wide-ranging repertoire of over 50 different operas in performance, recordings and on film. Highlights include Strauss’ Salome, Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, Rossini’s William Tell and La Cenerentola, Brian Irvine and Netia Jones’s Least Like The Other, Verdi’s Aida, La traviata and Rigoletto as well as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Before founding Irish National Opera in 2018, Fergus was Artistic Director of Wide Open Opera, which he founded in 2012 and Opera Theatre Company. He has produced opera in over 30 venues throughout Ireland as well as bringing productions to the UK (Edinburgh International Festival, Royal Opera House and The Barbican), USA, Holland, Luxembourg and Italy. As conductor, Fergus has worked with major orchestras and opera companies in Ireland as well as fulfilling engagements in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, UK, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Malta and Estonia.

Fergus Sheil studied music at Trinity College, graduating in 1992. While at TCD he founded the Trinity Orchestra. He currently delivers a module in career development at TCD’s Music Department and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary Doctor in Letters from TCD.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub