Recorded Oct 27, 2022

Prof. Julian Goodare (University of Edinburgh) delivers the keynote address of the "Demons: Good and Bad" interdisciplinary conference, organised by the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies and funded by the Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme.

How could you rule a magical world – a world pervaded by supernatural powers? You would have to make sure that people didn’t use illicit supernatural powers in antisocial ways. In particular, you would have to make sure that they didn’t use illicit supernatural powers subversively, against your own authority. But your main strategy for ruling successfully would be to get the best and strongest supernatural powers onto your side, while regulating or repressing anything that might be evil or might get out of control.

In this lecture, Prof. Goodare will sketch the various types of magical or supernatural power that godly rulers sought to regulate in early modern Europe. He will discuss both the control of elite magic and the control of popular magic. The focus on power is important. Early modern courts and institutions could be sites for power struggles over magic. Official demonology insisted that all magic was bad unless the authorities sanctioned it – but official demonology, while hegemonic, was never uncontested, nor did it always penetrate into systems of local government. And there were alternative demonologies, both elite and popular, that engaged differently with the magical world, taking a broader view of the legitimacy of magical power. Finally, Prof. Goodare will offer a small contribution to the ‘disenchantment debate’ by glancing at the processes that eventually began to reduce the authorities’ fear of illicit supernatural power. The magical world was becoming easier to rule.

Julian Goodare is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Edinburgh. He is author of The European Witch-Hunt (2016). His recent edited books include Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe (2020; co-edited with Rita Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen), The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (2020; co-edited with Martha McGill) and Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters (2013; editor). He is director of the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.

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

Recorded November 10, 2022

Responding to the devastation of the First World War, in 1922 T.S. Eliot wrote of showing us ‘fear in a handful of dust’, in his monumental poem, The Waste Land. On the centenary of the poem’s first full publication, this Behind the Headlines discussion confronts the ecological devastation of contemporary global landscapes, and ask: does the creative imagining of landscape ruination, destruction, and even apocalypse amount to effective protest?

In this panel, we hear from award-winning Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman; Cathriona Russell, Assistant Professor, Trinity School of Religion; Yairen Jerez Columbié, Assistant Professor, Trinity School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies; and Conor Brennan, PhD candidate in Trinity’s Department of Germanic Studies. They discuss whether the aesthetic depiction of waste lands – in art, film, or literature – prompt us to action, or simply to despair.

The postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has written that ‘[T]he crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions’ (The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 2021). In responding to this call, how can the Arts and Humanities best mobilise their resources to address the climate crisis, and what role does the imagination play in this task?

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

Recorded November 8, 2022

A special event exploring poetry and resistance organized by the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies and Poetry Ireland as part of the Literature and Resistance Series.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Anthony Anaxagorou joined us to read from their work, and to discuss how ideas of resistance inform and emerge from their writing, and how such ideas have also shaped their work beyond poetry, in research, teaching, mentoring, and publishing. The evening was introduced and chaired by Seán Hewitt, award-winning author of Tongues of Fire (2020) and All Down Darkness Wide (2022), and Teaching Fellow in the School of English at Trinity.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was a finalist for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award. In 2021, 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. The recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award and Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, she serves as an advisor on the boards of Culture Ireland and Diversifying Irish Poetry. Founder of the Play It Forward Fellowships for writers traditionally underrepresented in Irish literature, she is poetry editor at Skein Press and Fallow Media, and contributing editor with The Stinging Fly.

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. He is publications include the collections After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, 2019), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Year in both the Guardian and the Telegraph, and Heritage Aesthetics, published in November 2022. He is also the author of How To Write It (Merky Books, 2020), a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing, the craft of poetry and fiction, and the wider publishing industry. In 2022 Anthony founded Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection. He is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.

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

From October 6, 2022, Professor Michael Ignatieff delivered the Annual Edmund Burke Lecture for 2022, 'Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence.'

Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian writer, historian and former politician, now Rector Emeritus of the Central European University in Vienna and a professor in the history department. He has been a leader of the Liberal Party of Canada as well as a professor at the Kennedy School, Harvard, and is the author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, The Needs of Strangers, On Consolation, and many other works. 

‘All democracies born of revolution—France, America, and Ireland, for example—have to find ways to reckon with their revolutionary origins, and with the violence that attended their birth. Since revolutions empower the people to rise up in defence of their rights, revolutionary origins can continue to inspire succeeding generations to defend theirs, but they can also pose a continuing challenge to the stability of democratic institutions. Edmund Burke’s reflections on the revolutions of 1688 in Britain, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 can help us understand how contemporary democracies should handle the often combustible heritage of revolutionary origins.’

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

From October 11, 2022, a roundtable conversation hosted by Dr Pat Treusch as part of the Human+ Tech Talks series.

Robots that will populate our social everyday lives have become an ubiquitous figure of the sociotechnical imaginary of the Global North. They can take the shape of smaller artifacts to life-sized humanoid robots. Researchers have been examining the gendered, racialized and ableist dimensions of designing, building and implementing so-called social robots. This discussion aims to not only formulate a humanistic critique of engineering practices, but rather to deliver the points of departure to engineer social robots differently.

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

From September 27, 2022 | In the first event of the new academic year in the Literature & Resistance series, the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies and the Trinity Long Room Hub welcomed Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford, to discuss her book Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

 

Professor Mukherjee’s ground-breaking research combines literary and cultural criticism with clinical case studies to examine the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Drawing on extensive, collaborative research in six global cities, and reading works of contemporary world literature which explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy, Unseen City speaks profoundly and urgently to the multifaceted theme of resistance. 

 

For this special event, Professor Mukherjee was in conversation with Professor Ian Robertson, Co-Director of TCD’s Global Brain Health Institute, to discuss her work on the ground with Free Clinics in London and the unique insights this clinical engagement has enabled.

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

A seminar by Dr Kata Szita (TCD) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum. Recorded October 3, 2022.

Dr Kata Szita is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and ADAPT Centre of Excellence for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research involves the cognitive studies of immersive digital media technologies and she has authored a wide range of publications on attention, recollection, narrative engagement, and social behaviour in terms of smartphone spectatorship, augmented reality, cinematic virtual reality, social virtual reality, and the Metaverse. Currently, she leads interdisciplinary and cross-sector research projects on user experiences in social virtual reality and augmented reality and, as a collaborator, is involved in studies of the cognitive processing of fictional information, virtual youth behaviour, and digital personas. Szita is guest editor for PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality (MIT Press).

The School of Creative Arts Research Forum meets weekly on Mondays from 10am-11am in the Neill Lecture Theatre in Trinity Long Room Hub. The aim of the Forum is to provide a space for School researchers, both staff and postgraduate students, to share their ideas in an informal and supportive environment. It is also an opportunity for the School to hear about the research of colleagues both from within TCD and from outside the university who share our research interests. In line with the research agenda of the School, talks encompass traditional research and practice-based research.

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

Recorded September 27, 2022.

This discussion focuses on whether avatars and digital personas should be considered humans and reflects on the impacts of these on inclusivity, social dynamics, and digital practices. Combining angles of human psychology and behavior, society, digital technology, and aesthetics, we aim to dissect the following questions:

● How does humanity's engagement with digital media change social engagement in the long run?

● How can we increase realism in digital appearances and what does it do to identity and social interactions?

● How will digital personas become implemented in society and/or change social networks and behaviors?

Speakers: Dr. Kata Szita, Human+ Programme Fellow; Dr. Jennifer O'Meara, Assistant Professor in Film Studies, Trinity College Dublin; Prof. Aljosa Smolic, Professor of Creative Technologies, Trinity College Dublin; Jess Majekodunmi, Director, Human Sciences Studio at Accenture.

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

To launch the Human+ Tech Talks series, an online roundtable discussion hosted by Professor Vincent Wade, Chair of Computer Science (1990), Trinity College Dublin, brought together a distinguished panel of industry and academic experts to explore the ethical dimensions to human-centred AI. This panel was recorded September 13, 2022.

Speakers: Vincent Wade, co-Principal Investigator of the Human+ Programme and Director of Adapt, Trinity College Dublin; Linda Hogan, Professor of Ecumenics in the School of Religion, Trinity College Dublin; David Lewis, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin.

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

A seminar by Maria Zukovs (University of St Andrews), as part of the Trinity Centre for Early Modern History Seminar Series, recorded November 7, 2022.

The Trinity Centre for Early Modern History promotes understanding of the culture, society, economy, religion, politics and warfare of early modern Europe. The Centre organises seminars, conferences and public lectures on the early modern history of Ireland, Britain and Continental Europe, as well as on relations between European and non-European states and cultures.

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