Recorded February 9th, 2024.

Hosted by the School of English of Trinity College Dublin and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute.

The way violence is represented always influences its reception and integration within the cultural imaginary. The narration of violence is ingrained in our perception of ourselves and our communities, and those who report traumatic events then carry the responsibility of how they are received and memorialised.

Just as the world emerged from the COVID-19 crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned the general atmosphere of hope for a new beginning into an even darker and more oppressive state of uncertainty, fear, and sorrow. As scholar Judith Lewis Herman has observed, “[t]he conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”[1] How do newspapers and media reports choose which pieces of information are to be shared with the public? Why are certain stories considered more important than others? On which premises are specific pieces of news discarded? How geographically, culturally, and socially inclusive are these narratives? And, most importantly, when it comes to trauma, how ethical and accurate can its depiction be when told by someone else?

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded January 29th, 2024.

A seminar by Cáit Murphy (TCD) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.

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Recorded April 19, 2023.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Annual Humanities Horizons Lecture for 2023 was delivered by Prof Lyndsey Stonebridge (Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham).

In February 2023, photos appeared on social media of piles of books dumped in the streets outside the Pryazovskyi State University in Mariupol, allegedly by occupying Russian soldiers. In the US and elsewhere novels and history books are being weaponized in the culture wars. The humanities are back on the frontline of ideology and politics. In this lecture, Lyndsey Stonebridge turns to political-philosopher, Hannah Arendt’s writing on twentieth-century totalitarianism to argue why we need to fight for a new anti-totalitarian humanities today.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Her previous books include: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2014, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize, 2018, and a collection of essay, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020). We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be published by Jonathan Cape in January 2024.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded January 24, 2024.

An interactive seminar by Jakob Summerer (TCD) Therapeutic Metaphor Use: Lessons from Eating Disorder Autopathography as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Ever since Susan Sontag’s pioneering studies Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Aids and its Metaphors (1989), research into the potential effects of metaphor use in health-related talk and thought has been a staple of the Medical/Health Humanities. Following in Sontag’s footsteps, scholars have focussed both on the ethical implications and stigmatising effects of metaphor use, as well as the scripto- and biblio-therapeutic potential of metaphorising illness experience. What is, unfortunately, all too often missing in discussions of metaphor in the Medical/Health Humanities (and, in fact, in Sontag’s own work) is any theoretical, methodological or empirical grounding in those fields that have come to specialise in metaphor analysis and metaphor-based treatment interventions respectively: Linguistic Metaphor Theory and Metaphor Therapy. Informed by these approaches and building on a stylistic analysis of contemporary memoirs written by people with eating disorders, I will explore in this paper what a post-Sontagian approach to illness metaphor might look like. I will further outline some of the insights such an approach may yield into the uses and abuses of metaphor in recovery from mental illness.

Jakob Summerer is currently doing his PhD research on metaphor and metonymy use in German-language eating disorder memoirs at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He teaches classes on German film, language, and literature at Maynooth University and TCD. At TCD, he acts as representative for the PGRs in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. He further acts as the PG representative within the German Studies Association of Ireland.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 12, 2023.

The Trinity Long Room Hub hosted the distinguished Yeats scholar Professor Marjorie Howes (Boston College) to mark the centenary of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature award to W.B. Yeats in a special lecture, ‘Yeats, the Nobel, and the Labour of Writing’.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 1, 2023.

Dr Peter Crooks: Department of History; Academic Director, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (virtualtreasury.ie).

Paper: ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished? Trinity’s Dublin Deeds and The Case for a Meta-Collection’.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 11, 2023.

The Trinity Long Room Hub was pleased to host "Addressing 'Democracy, Governance and Education' Today" in partnership with Boston College.

Speakers:

Jonathan Laurence

Professor of Political Science, Boston College, and Director, Clough Centre for the Study of Constitutional Democracy

Linda Hogan

Chair of Ecumenics, School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies, Trinity College Dublin

James F. Keenan, S.J.

Canisius Chair and Vice Provost for Global Engagement, Boston College

Elspeth Payne

Co-ordinator, Trinity Long Room Hub Democracy Forum and Research Fellow, EU Horizon Europe Critical ChangeLab Creative Democracy Education Project

Chair: Eve Patten, Director, Trinity Long Room Hub

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 1, 2023.

Professor Ruth Mazo Karras: Lecky Professor of History, TCD.

Paper: ‘The Holy Acrobat in the Beatus Initial, TCD MS 53’

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 1, 2023.

Dr Ann Buckley: Medieval History Research Centre, TCD.

Paper: ‘The Many Lives of the Medieval Liturgy: The Relevance of the Carnegie Digitisation Project for Irish and Insular Studies’.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded December 1, 2023.

Dr Claire McNulty: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, TCD.

Paper: ‘Mirrors, Morality, and the Virgin Mary: TCD MS 103’.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/