Recorded October 18, 2018.

This public lecture will be presented by Professor Alexander Watson, Professor of History, Goldsmiths, University of London.

The end of the First World War was a transformative moment for East-Central Europe. The historiography is dominated by the fraught peace deliberations to build a brave new world and the ethnic rivalry and ideological conflict within and between the newly forming nation states in 1919-23. This talk will focus on the earlier, neglected instant of Habsburg imperial collapse in October 1918. It will ask why, in a period usually defined by its violence and chaos, the revolutions that spread across the empire were so strangely bloodless, rapid and orderly. The talk explores the complex reasons for this swift transition of power and what it reveals about the potential for a more harmonious post-war world.

This lecture is part of the 1918 and the New Europe lecture series.

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

Recorded November 8, 2018.

Dublin has experienced rapid social change in recent years, becoming increasingly culturally and religiously diverse due to large-scale inward migration. Considering ongoing debates on how to balance social cohesion and migration-related diversity, this session will feature contributions from Emma Quin, the Head of the European Migration Network Ireland, Bryan Fanning, Professor of Migration and Social Policy at University College Dublin and author of Migration and the Making of Ireland, and Jane Xavier from the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland.

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

Recorded December 11, 2018.

A public lecture by visiting Trinity Long Room Hub fellow Professor Barry McCrea (Notre Dame) on Language Change and Social Class in the Novel.

The lecture will compare the ways minor languages and socio-economic class interact as narrative elements in a variety of European authors, including Joyce, Proust, Edna O'Brien, Flann O'Brien, Ó Cadhain, Dickens, Ferrante

About Barry McCrea

Barry McCrea is a novelist and scholar of modern European, Latin American, and Irish literature. He most recent book is Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016. He is the author of The First Verse, a novel, winner of a number of awards including the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble "Discover" prize, and of In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (Columbia University Press, 2011), which won the Yale Heyman Prize for scholarship in the humanities.Professor McCrea holds has a BA in Romance languages from Trinity College Dublin, and a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton. Before joining Notre Dame, he taught comparative literature at Yale University, where he was appointed full professor in 2012. Professor McCrea teaches fall semesters in the Rome and Dublin Global Gateways and spring semesters on campus.

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

Recorded December 7, 2018.

Listen back to this ‘In Conversation’ with Catherine Corless who was interviewed by Professor of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, Aoife Mc Lysaght.

As a family historian researching in her own time and without any university affiliation, Catherine Corless has worked on a particular, and shameful, aspect of Irish history, namely the “Mother and Baby Homes”. Her work in gathering information on the institution in Tuam, Co. Galway, has revealed patterns of the mistreatment of individuals, both adult women and their infants, under de facto incarceration. Though local people may have been aware of the conditions, the absence of records and hard data allowed the hierarchy of these institutions and the state to ignore or deny the extent or even the existence of the mistreatment and incarceration. Catherine Corless meticulously collected records of births, deaths and burials, which ultimately lead to the uncovering of a mass grave in the location of the septic tank system. This meant that the shameful history of the institution could no longer be ignored.

Catherine Corless’s work required careful collection and cross-referencing of records. When she requested records from the Western Health Boards and from the Bon Secours Sisters (who ran the institution) she was told that they had none. She was informed that because she had no university qualification or affiliation the local county council were also unwilling to give her the records she needed. Ultimately, she requested records of deaths at the home from the Galway registry. There were 796 such deaths but no burial records.

She has shed light on this Irish institution, while establishing an all too familiar pattern that was not unique to Tuam. Her work has been key to forcing the recognition of the mistreatment of innocent individuals in these institutions and as such is an important agent of social change in Ireland.

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

Recorded November 21, 2018.

A public lecture by Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Reserach Fellow Professor Sirshendu Majumdar who joins us from Bolpur College, University of Burdwan, India in association with Trinity’s School of English. The focus of his research visit is a project entitled 'Rabindranath Tagore's Reception in Ireland,’ and the Fellowship is supported by the Priya Nair Visiting Research Programme.

This lecture traces how the act of reading has been represented in some of the literary texts in Bengali in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are various ways in which reading has been represented in a period when the Bengali book was making its dent upon the popular imagination, particularly women. The thrust of the lecture will be on the reception of the Bengali book, a reception which often has close links with that in the west. I shall attempt to lace the lecture with one or two parallel examples from the reception of the book in Ireland of the same period.

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

Recorded December 3, 2018.

What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? This will be the central question of our latest Behind the Headlines discussion to explore the human experience of today. A broad ranging series of talks traversing the humanities, sciences, arts and social sciences, this event is an unmissable snapshot of human progress; who we are, where we are, and where we’re going.

The Behind the Headlines series is supported by the John Pollard Foundation.

This Behind the Headlines discussion will launch a new flagship public lecture series starting in 2019 in partnership with The Dock, Accenture’s global research & incubation hub in Dublin. ‘What it means to be human in the 21st century’ will convene a cross-disciplinary conversation on how we understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it.

Speakers:

Genevieve Bell, Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University, Director of the 3A Institute, and Senior Fellow at Intel

Mark O’Connell, writer and author of To be a Machine

Lorna Ross, Group Director, Fjord Dublin

Kevin Mitchell, Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin

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

Recorded November 26, 2018.

The inaugural lecture of the new three year lecture series 'Out of the Ashes' will be presented by Ismail Serageldin, Founding Director Emeritus, Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

In the first lecture of the series, Ismail Serageldin, Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria inaugurated in 2002, will consider the rebirth of the ancient Library and threats to its survival in the face of ongoing turmoil in the region.

The Out of the Ashes lecture series is generously supported by Sean and Sarah Reynolds.

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

Recorded November 26, 2018.

Why make movies?": In conversation with Lenny Abrahamson

The School of Creative Arts www.tcd.ie… is proud to present a discussion between acclaimed director Lenny Abrahamson (The Little Stranger, Room, Frank, What Richard Did, Garage, Adam & Paul, etc.) and the Head of Film Studies, Associate Prof. Ruth Barton covering the topic why film-makers make movies.

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

Recorded November 5, 2018.

For many countries in the world today, populist and authoritarian approaches to government hold more appeal than the status quo. Through our latest Behind the Headlines discussion we ask why.

Our panel of experts will look at what we mean by crisis, and how we must look closer to home to understand its roots, including economic stagnation and historical political divisions; and on the eve of potentially historic mid-term elections in the US, panellists will consider journalism and the politics of resentment, and citizenship and statelessness.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Behind the Headlines series is supported by the John Pollard Foundation.

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

Recorded September 24, 2018.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Annual Humanities Horizons Lecture for 2018 will be delivered by Professor Homi K. Bhabha (Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost at Harvard University.)

Professor Bhabha will address the global migration crisis and its causes from the humanities perspective. He will speak of how discrimination and dishonour, the two faces of “barbaric nationalism”, have been mobilized to denigrate minority populations whether they are in flight or “at home”, and of how divisive ethno nationalism has been fuelled by leaders with utter contempt for democratic party-politics, who project themselves as pioneers of a mercurial “movement” politics. Drawing on real-life events and literary references, Professor Bhabha will examine how, for today’s migrants and refugees, the very act of hope and survival, the decision to flee, can become a close encounter with mortality.

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