A lunchtime 'in conversation' event on March 28th, 2023, featuring Visiting Research Fellow Prof Dariusz Komorowski (University of Wroclaw) in conversation with Prof Jürgen Barkhoff (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, TCD).

Dariusz Komorowski is a Professor of German Philology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Since 2005 he has been the Head of the Research Centre for German-Swiss Literature and since 2017 the co-originator and editor-in-chief of the online magazine “CH-Studien. Zeitschrift zu Literatur und Kultur aus der Schweiz” which he leads in cooperation with Anna Fattori (Rome) and Jan Jambor (Prešov). From 2012 to 2018 he was the Head of the postgraduate studies in “Cultural Management in the Cooperation of Regions of the European Union" at the University of Wroclaw. Dariusz Komorowski has conducted seminars and given lectures at the universities in Göttingen, Zurich and Maribor and organised several international seminars for master students in cooperation with those universities.

Jürgen Barkhoff is Professor of German (1776) and Head of Discipline in Germanic Studies. Before he was Vice-Provost/Chief Academic Officer and Deputy President of Trinity College Dublin. He teaches German literature and German and European Cultural History from 1750 to the present. His main research areas are literature and medicine, science and psychology around 1800, questions of identity in the German-speaking world and contemporary Swiss literature.

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

A lunchtime 'in conversation' event on April 4th, 2023, featuring Rooney Writer Fellow Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe in conversation with Dr Sean Hewitt (School of English, TCD), organized by Trinity Long Room Hub.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. A finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award, it was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, National Poetry Day Recommendation, Shakespeare & Co. Year of Reading Selection, and a Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.

Seán Hewitt is a poet, writer and literary critic. Before joining Trinity, he held postdoctoral positions at University College Cork and at TCD, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Irish Research Council, respectively. His teaching and research interests are mainly focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and Irish literature. He also has an ongoing interest in the environmental humanities, and in studies of literature and science.

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

Recorded March 16, 2023.

A lecture by Martina Zimmermann (King's College London) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Cultural pessimism about ageing is grounded in a decline narrative that upholds youth as embodying the independent, vital self. Scientific accounts of senescence, by comparison, describe ageing as a life-time continuum involving ‘growth, development, and maturation … just as much as atrophy and degeneration’ (Shock, 1951, p. 1). This means culture adopts a partial perspective on the biological realities of ageing, taking outcomes of senescence research as merely extending the years fraught with age-related ailments, where dreams of arrested ageing further fuel pessimism, because they hold the status of curative solutions. Culturally prescribed ageing is successful ageing, and any deviation from this narrative script, real or imagined, furthers negativity about progression on the temporal trajectory towards old age. This paper situates the older person and their care at the biology/culture interface. It specifically focuses on life narratives and the concept of successful ageing driving such narratives. In particular, it explores the connection between ageing and illness to interrogate how life narratives confront biological realities of ageing. In doing so it pursues two aims: (1) it looks at the role of illness in older age in directing self-perceptions and self-representations of ageing as failure, and (2) it considers different forms of life narratives and their possibilities and limitations in articulating ageing as a biological reality.

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

Recorded February 27, 2023.

An 'in conversation' event featuring Visiting Research Fellow Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews) in conversation with Prof Aileen Douglas (Professor of English, TCD) and organized by Trinity Long Room Hub.

Susan Manly is a Reader in English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her research interests are in Romantic-period Irish and English literature. She is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), the best-selling Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, and has produced scholarly editions of a wide range of Edgeworth's writings. She is currently completing a political biography of Edgeworth. This will be the first account of Edgeworth's life to appear in the last 45 years. It will provide a new assessment of Edgeworth's intellectual and political life, looking at her milieux, correspondences, allegiances, interventions, and influence. Edgeworth's sustained engagements with debates about Ireland, about slavery and about women will form a major part of the story told in this biography. In 2019, Susan made a radio documentary about Edgeworth, ‘A Radical Life’ which aired on RTÉ Lyric FM in May 2019 and re-aired in May 2020. You can hear it here. As part of Susan’s research for her new political biography of Maria Edgeworth, she has been looking at Edgeworth’s attitude towards West Indian and especially Jamaican slavery in the early nineteenth century. Edgeworth’s fictions and plays often figured emancipated African and Creole characters: for instance, her celebrated novel, Belinda (1801) – originally entitled Abroad and At Home – features two such characters. The extent and nature of Edgeworth’s personal knowledge of and implication with the West Indies, however, has never been fully established before.

Educated in Ireland and America, Aileen Douglas holds a PhD from Princeton University. She began her academic career in the States, teaching at Washington University in St. Louis for five years before returning to Trinity to take up a position in the School of English. Her research interests focus on the writing of the long eighteenth century. In her monographs, 'Work in Hand: Print, Script, and Writing, 1690-1820' (OUP 2017) and 'Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body' (Chicago 1996) she explores aspects of embodiment, materiality, and literary representation. She also has a particular interest in Irish writing and writing by women. Aileen Douglas is a General Editor of the IRC-supported Early Irish Fiction 1690-1820 series (Four Courts, 2011-) and has co-edited two volumes for the series. Her co-edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield for the Cambridge Collected Works of Goldsmith is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2024.

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

Recorded 16 February 2023.

A hybrid lecture by Evi Numen (TCD) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series. Medical museums begun their existence as galleries of wonder, a way to celebrate God’s creations through collecting and publicly accessible display. As medical knowledge and teaching developed, medical collections moved from this quasi-religious domain to establishments of scientific research and education out of the public eye. The advent of modern imaging and other teaching technologies pushed some of these difficult-to-upkeep collections into obscurity altogether. In recent years, they are coming out of the shadows, bringing with them some difficult questions and inconvenient narratives, entwined as they are with stories and practices of a colonialist past. Others complicate our understanding of human diversity, ability, and consent, and invite us to bridge the gap between specimen and visitor. This lecture investigates that transition by tracing the past of the Old Anatomy Museum and discussing its future. How did medical education practices evolve from body snatching to body donation? What lessons can we learn from a 200-year-old skeleton in a cabinet? What can an illustration of a syphilis sufferer tell us about public health today? These are some of the questions we are called upon to grapple with, as we embark on a project to establish a medical heritage centre around a collection that spans 300 years of medical education in Ireland, and includes human remains, anatomical models, medical illustrations, and striking portraits of patients and physicians.

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

Tuesday, 21 February 2023, 1 – 2pm

An 'in conversation' event featuring Visiting Research Fellow Dr Şebnem Susam-Saraeva in conversation with Dr James Hadley (Ussher Assistant Professor in Literary Translation, Trinity College Dublin) and organized by Trinity Long Room Hub.

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. Her research interests have included retranslations, research methodology in translation studies, internationalization of the discipline, and translation and gender, literary theories, popular music, social movements, maternal health and ecofeminism. She is the author of Translation and Popular Music. Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations (2015) and Theories on the Move. Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories (2006), and editor of Translation and Music (2008), Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting. Participatory and Engaged Perspectives (2012, with Luis Pérez-González) and the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Health (2021, with Eva Spišiaková). Susam-Saraeva’s literary translations into Turkish include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1993, 18 reprints by 2022). She is also the winner of PEN Wales Translation Challenge 2017 with her poetry translation from Küçük İskender.

James Hadley is Trinity’s Ussher Assistant Professor in Literary Translation. He is also the Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation and Director of the MPhil in Literary Translation. His particular interests are translation theory and practice, especially when it comes to the interaction between humans and machines. James’ research also centres on human-machine interaction in Translation Studies. He champions empirical and Digital Humanities methodologies in the field, using computer technologies to answer questions related to literary translation that were previously unaskable. Currently, much of James’ research attention is divided between the rapidly emerging fields of CALT (Computer Assisted Literary Translation), LMT (Literary Machine Translation), and the little researched topic of indirect translation (translations of translations). Much of James’ research is not language-specific or traverses a wide range of language pairs. However, his main translation language pair is Japanese | English. In terms of translation practice, he has a particular interest in pre-modern and early modern Japanese literature. In 2021 he co-translated a collection of medieval Japanese poems.

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

Recorded February 21, 2023

Global conversations centred on custodianship and care of historic human remains provide the focus for the Trinity Long Room Hub’s latest Behind the Headlines discussion, which highlights the complexities and tensions surrounding the retention or reburial of human remains.

As many international news sites have recently reported, Trinity College Dublin is currently working with inhabitants of Inishbofin Island to address the potential return of remains taken from the island in 1890 and stored for more than a century on campus.

In this panel chaired by Dr Ciaran O'Neill from Trinity’s School of Histories and Humanities, we hear from Dr Olof Ljungström, the Head of Department at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm); Peggy King Jorde, the activist behind New York City's African Burial Ground; Prof Samuel Redman, author of Bone Rooms (2016); and Evi Numen, the Curator for the Old Anatomy Museum at Trinity College Dublin.

They hope to situate this case in a broader philosophical, moral, and cultural context, and to learn from four experts who will reflect on their own experience of negotiating questions of repatriation in the museum and university sectors.

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

An online seminar by Professor Leszek Drong (University of Silesia) organised by the School of English, recorded January 26, 2023.

“Partition narratives and regions of memory” will focus on Upper Silesia (a historical region in the south of Poland) and its history articulated in regional memory, which often stands in sharp contrast to national historical narratives taught in Polish schools. The point of this presentation is to tease out those aspects of collective memory that address unique concerns of the so-called ‘autochthons’, the native borderland population of Upper Silesia. A selection of contemporary Silesian writings (in English translation) will be scrutinized for memory traces of the partition that divided Upper Silesia in 1922 and then, in the course of the 20th century, was succeeded by other borders and boundaries in the region. The presentation will be chaired by Professor Eve Patten, Director, Trinity Long Room Hub.

Leszek Drong is Professor of Humanities in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is also Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities as well as vice-president of the Polish Association for Irish Studies. Currently, until the end of February 2023, he is a visiting research fellow in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book was published in 2019: Tropy konfliktu. Retoryka pamięci kulturowej we współczesnej powieści północnoirlandzkiej [Troping the Troubles: The Rhetoric of Cultural Memory in Recent Novels from Northern Ireland]. He has also published in Orbis Litterarum, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and Estudios Irlandeses. His primary research interest is in the intersection of Irish studies, cultural memory studies and border studies. His current project, “Remembering Partitions and Repartitioning Memories in Contemporary Narratives from Northern Ireland and Upper Silesia,” explores parallels between the two regional remembrance cultures.

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

A roundtable discussion hosted by Dr Qian Xiao as part of the Human+ Tech Talks series, recorded November 22, 2022.

Online education has become a mainstream form of education in many countries during the pandemic. The market for AI-enhanced personalized tutoring systems is therefore growing in great demand and popularity. This allows recording rich information of learner's interactions, thus opening up the possibilities of studying 'learner's behavior at scale using machine learning techniques. In this seminar, we will share the challenges and opportunities when building personalized online education systems. We'll also showcase tangible examples of how we can leverage deep neural networks and large volumes of behavioral data to tackle these challenges.

Speakers: Dr Qian Xiao, Human+ Programme Fellow; Prof Vincent Wade, Chair of Computer Science (1990), Trinity College Dublin; Dr Keith Johnston, Assistant Professor, Education, Trinity College Dublin.

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

An online roundtable discussion hosted by Dr Nicola Palladino as part of the Human+ Tech Talks series, recorded November 1, 2022.

Building trust around a disruptive technology such as AI is deemed crucial in order to realise its full potential while minimising the risks to people and communities. Trustworthiness has become a key concept in AI development and governance, as testified by recent EU, IEEE, and ISO initiatives. However, Trustworthy AI conceptual boundaries and practical implications still raise questions prompting further investigation.

By combining different perspectives and backgrounds, speakers discuss the rationale behind the concept, the state-of-the-art of its operationalisation, as well as the challenges to be faced and possible ways forward.

Speakers: Prof Blanaid Clarke, McCann FitzGerald Chair in Corporate Law, Trinity College Dublin; Dr. Nicola Paladino, Human+ Programme Fellow; Prof David Lewis, Associate Professor, Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin; Dr. Kenneth McKenzie, Research Portfolio Lead, Human Sciences Studio, Accenture, Dr. David Filip, chair of NSAI TC 02/SC 18 AI, convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 43/WG 3 AI Trustworthiness.

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