Trinity Centre for Asian Studies

Human Translators in Focus: Exploring the Human Aspects of Japanese Literary Translation through a Sociological Lens

22 – 24 October 2025 - Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Venue: Hybrid
This is the first call for submissions
Click here for more details
This conference showcases research on the human aspects of Japanese literary translation. It contributes to the development of Japanese Translation Studies and raises the visibility of the Japanese context within Translation Studies.

Taiwan–Ireland Poetry Translation Competition Winners

Wednesday, 11 December 2024, 10:00–11:00 am GMT
Venue: Zoom Click here for more details
Each year, the Taiwan–Ireland Poetry Translation Competition invites participants from across the globe to explore the diverse linguistic and cultural traditions of Taiwan and their connections to Irish poetry. This year’s competition centers on the poem Notes on Interviews with the Slamaw《莎拉茅群訪談記事》by Temu Suyan. The poem, written in Mandarin, reflects the experiences of the Slamaw people, an indigenous subgroup of the Atayal tribe from Taiwan’s Dajia River Basin. The event is free and open to all.

Webinar: Juan Qian (University of Chicago) - The Loyalty-Compliance Tradeoff: Political Campaigns and Bureaucratic Control in Modern China

Thursday, 28 November 2024, 5:00–6:00 pm,
Venue: Zoom Click here for more details
Between 1949 and 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Chairman Mao Zedong launched a series of chaotic, mass-mobilized campaigns to purge political dissidents and transform China’s socioeconomic landscape. In his book manuscript, Juan Qian explores (1) why there exist significant geospatial variations in the intensity and outcomes of these campaigns, and (2) how Mao-era campaigns shaped the norms, compliance, and responsiveness of the Chinese bureaucracy at the local level in both the short and long term. Click here for more details

Xun Gong (University of Vienna) – Language Contact and the Reconstruction of Tangut Phonology

Tuesday, 19 November 2024, 4:00–5:30 pm,
TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, Sixth Floor
The Tangut language, once spoken by the Western Xia dynasty (1038–1227), presents a unique case for linguistic reconstruction due to its extinction and the limited availability of contemporary data. In this talk, Xun Gong will explore how language contact phenomena have influenced the reconstruction of Tangut phonology. Click here for more details

Swami Sarvapriyananda - Spirituality for our times: Sister Nivedita on Vedanta and Vivekananda

Thursday 14th November 2024, 7:30pm,
Trinity College Chapel, Front Square
The Trinity Centre for Asian Studies are pleased to host the Inaugural Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) Lecture, to be given by Swami Sarvapriyananda. The lecture will be introduced by Professor Nathan Hill, Director of Asian Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Click here for more details

Dr. Ching-Ling Wang (Curator of Chinese Art, Rijksmuseum), Weaving the Faith: Buddhist Hangings at the Qing Court in the 18th Century

Wednesday 6th November 2024, 6:30pm - 7:30pm,
Hybrid- Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. Also via Zoom
The lecture will explore the creation and significance of Buddhist hangings within the Qing imperial court, with a focus on the conserved 18th-century silk hanging, "Buddhas of the Three Generations." The event is co-hosted by our institution and the Chester Beatty, and the conservation project has been supported by the Heritage Council. Click here for more details

Joanna Bialek (Trinity College Dublin) - Reconstructing Grammatical Meaning in Extinct Languages: The Case of Passive in Old Literary Tibetan

Tuesday 5 November 2024, 4-5:30pm,
TRiSS seminar room
The talk shall clarify several misconceptions or misunderstandings that have accumulated over time concerning passive in Tibetic languages and that exert their influences far beyond the sphere of language acquisition and use. Click here for more details

Jacob Dalton -- Managing Secrecy: Early Tibetan Imperial Attitudes toward Tantric Buddhism

Thursday, 31 October, 5-6pm,
TRiSS seminar room
This talk will explore the Tibetan empire's approach to tantric Buddhism during the mid-to-late eighth century, when the empire was at the peak of its power. Jacob Dalton is the Khyentse Foundation Distinguished University Professor in Tibetan Buddhism at UC Berkeley. Click here for more details

Hiroshima & Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition: 22-25 October 2024

Trinity College Dublin is honoured to host the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition, co-organized by the Embassy of Japan in Ireland and the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies. Click here for more details

Adrian Tien Prize awarded to Min Chen

We are delighted to announce that Min Chen has been awarded the Adrian Tien Prize for her exceptional dissertation titled, "Research on the Tones and Tone Sandhi of the Deyang Dialect in Sichuan

Congratulations to the 2024-25 Chinese Studies scholarship recipients

These scholarships are a testament to the dedication and excellence of our students, and we look forward to the remarkable contributions they will make to our academic community. Warmest congratulations to Yile Gu, Siyuan Liu, Earl Mok, and Wenxuan Yang on their remarkable achievements

Joanna Bialek to join TCAS with a Marie Curie project on ancient Tibetan funerary rituals

Joanna Bialek has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship under the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) for the project “Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction” (TOMB), which will run for the next two years.
Click here for more details

Swami Balabhadrananda -- The Self and Divinity in Vedantae

Tuesday 10 September, 2-3pm,
venue: room 2026, Arts Building Annex (across from Douglas Hyde Gallery)
This talk will delve into the core concepts of Advaita Vedanta, a non-dualistic school of Hindu philosophy that posits the essential oneness of the Self (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman). Swami Balabhadrananda will explore how this tradition accounts for the relationship between the individual soul and the divine.
Click here for more details

TCAS hosts two lectures by Visiting Professor Kirill Solonin (Renmin University of China)

Kirill Solonin (Renmin University of China) - Tangut Synthesis: Sino-Tibetan Buddhism during 11th-13th centuries
Monday 20 May, 10am-12pm,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor.

Kirill Solonin (Renmin University of China) - Who were the Tanguts and Why study them.
Friday 17 May, 2-4pm, venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor.

Click here for more details of both lectures

Webinar: Ruiqing Shen (National University of Singapore) - Inland Min in a historical perspective

Friday 17 May 10:30am-12:00pm (Dublin) ,
Venue: Zoom
note: this event is in Chinese
Click here for more details

Webinar: John Carlyle (University of Washington) - Some Remarks on the Development of OC *a in Min Chinese

Friday 3rd May 10:30am-12:00pm (Dublin),
venue: Zoom
Click here for more details

Webinar: Kwok Bit-Chee (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) - 從比較音韻的角度看莆仙片方言在沿海閩語中的位置

Friday 10 May 10:30am-12:00pm (Dublin), 17:30pm-19pm (Hong Kong),
venue: Zoom
Note: This event is in Chinese.
Click here for more details

New approaches to computational historical linguistics in the Asian context

Monday 29 April, 2-4pm ,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor
Click here for more details

Simone O’Malley Sutton - The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers of Modernism and Fighters against the Colonial Condition

Thursday 11 April, 5-5:45pm,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor
Click here for more details

Martin Worthington (Trinity College Dublin) - How consistent is Akkadian idiom? Attributive adjectives and the attributive construct state

Tuesday 9 April, 4-5pm,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor
Click here for more details

Jobymon Skaria (St Patrick's Pontifical University) - St. Thomas Christians'encounter with the caste system in South India

Thursday 21 March, 5-6pm,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor
This lecture examines the scandalous history of St Thomas Christians’ encounter with the caste system. Click here for more details

Dieter Gunkel (University of Richmond) - The syntactic expression of polarity focus in Vedic prose

Tuesday 19 March, 4-5pm, ,
venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor
This presentation explores how polarity focus is expressed in Vedic Sanskrit prose texts, especially the Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa (AB) and the Jaiminīya-Brāhmaṇa (JB). Click here for more details

Webinar: Binbin Xu (Xiamen University) - 论闽南方言多功能词“kaʔ”的音义共变模式 / The Coevolution of Form and Meaning of the Multifunctional Word kaʔ in Southern Min Dialects

Friday 15 March, 10:30 am-12pm (Dublin), 18:30 pm - 20:00 pm (Beijing).
Note: This event is in Chinese,
venue: Zoom Click here for more details

International conference: What We Talk About When We Talk About Haruki Murakami’s Translators: Their Roles and Significance (村上春樹の翻訳者について語るときに我々の語ること)

29 May 2024, 09:45AM-18:00PM (Tokyo), venue: Hydrid Format- The Haruki Murakami Library, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan (in Japanese/English).
30 May 2024, 09:45AM-18:30PM (Dublin) venue: Hydrid Format- Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation (TCLCT), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (in English).
These conferences shed light on Murakami’s translators and the significance of their roles in the publication and circulation of his novels. Click here for more details

Muhammad Ilyas (Trinity College Dublin) - Light Verb Constructions in Balti, Tibetan

Tuesday 12 March, 4-5pm, venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor. This presentation explores the light verb constructions of Balti, a Tibetan language spoken in northern Pakistan. Click here for more details

Webinar: Jonathan Smith (Christop her Newport University) - New digital resources for the study of historical and comparative Mǐn

Friday 8 March, 3:30-5pm (Dublin), 10:30am-12pm (Virginia), venue: Zoom. Data on modern Mǐn languages is increasingly plentiful, and Romanized materials dating to the 19th century bear important early witness to the languages of Amoy, Teochew, Hokchiu, and others. However, many of these resources are difficult to access and leverage. In this talk, I aim to describe (1) key sources and their nature; (2) some of my recent efforts at organization and digitization; and also (3) a few notable language features thus rendered more amenable to study. Click here for more details

Japan and Ireland: A Conversation with Ambassador Maruyama Norio

Thursday 7 March 2024, 6.15pm , venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. The Trinity Centre for Asian Studies and the Trinity Long Room Hub are pleased to host a special discussion with His Excellency, Maruyama Norio, Ambassador of Japan to Ireland. The Ambassador will be welcomed by Professor Emma Stokes, Vice President for Global Engagement, and the discussion hosted by Professor Lorna Carson, Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Science, Trinity College Dublin. Click here for more details

Webinar: Yang Wanglong (Xiamen University) - 沿海闽语强化类方位词重叠的共性特征 / Some universals of localizer reduplication with intensified meaning in inshore-Min dialects (note: this event is in Chinese)

Friday 1 March-10:30am-12:00pm (Dublin), 6:30-8pm (Beijing) , venue: Zoom. Click here for more details

Year of the Dragon, podcast with Professor Isabella Jackson

Professor Isabella Jackson, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, here at TCD was recently interviewed by Newstalk about the Chinese New Year. Please click here for link to the interview

TCAS hosts workshop on automatic speech recognition for minority Asian languages

On 19 January 2024, TCAS hosted a hands-on training in the development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) studied languages. The training was led by Dr Alexander O’Neill and Liam Lonergan. Alexander is a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS University of London specializing in Sanskrit Buddhist texts and Newar language processing. Liam is a PhD student at the Trinity Phonetics and Speech Laboratory, who is developing an Irish ASR model as part of his doctoral research. The event provided participants with valuable skills in data normalization, model training, and data augmentation techniques. An attendee, Dr Tim Bodt, successfully created a model for Kusunda, a language isolate from Nepal with only one remaining speaker; great progress as also made on models for Khroskyabs and Tujia, two endangered Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in China.

Sichuan: Diversity, Heritage, and Transformation

Thursday 1 February 2024, 12:30-4:30pm, Trinity Long Room Hub, Neill Lecture Theatre

Yunfan Lai awarded the Anna Siewierska Award by Societas Linguistica Europaea

Yunfan Lai, post-doctoral researcher and Principal Investigator of the GyU-LHA project under the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme at TCAS, has been awarded the 2023 Anna Siewierska Award for his paper entitled "When internal reconstruction goes further: Proposing the vowel system of Pre-Khroskyabs through examining bound state apophony,"

Alexander James O’Neill (SOAS University of London) – Breaking the Textual Fourth Wall: On Paratextuality and Self-Referentiality in Mahāyāna Sūtra Literature

Thursday 18 January 2024, 5:30-7pm, Arts Building, Room 4050A

Adrian Tien Prize awarded to Joseph Mossop

We are delighted to announce that Joseph Mossop has been awarded the Adrian Tien Prize for his exceptional dissertation titled, "An Investigation into China’s Past, Present, and Future in Global Environmental Politics."

Congratulations to the 2023-24 Chinese Studies scholarship recipients

These scholarships are a testament to the dedication and excellence of our students, and we look forward to the remarkable contributions they will make to our academic community. Warmest congratulations to Chen Min, Wu Yingru, Lei Mingyang, and Kim Eunseon on their remarkable achievements

Mario De Grandis (University College Dublin) - Mapping the Central-Peripheral Dynamic: Literary Platforms in the Field of Huizu wenxue

Thursday 9 November, 5-6pm, TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor.

Jingqi Ying (TCD) - The Old Chinese Sound Change *-ps > *-ts > -jH: Insights from Zhou Excavated Documents

Tuesday 7 November, 4-5:30pm, TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor.

Wenqing Kang (Cleveland State University) - Reemergence of Public Discussion on Homosexuality in 1980s and 1990s China

Thursday 19 October, 5-6pm, TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor.

William Marotti (UCLA) - The Performance of Police and the Theater of Protest, from Japan 1968 to BLM

Thursday 28 September, 5-6pm, TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor

Muhammad Zakaria (Independent researcher) - The Historical Development of Causative/Applicative and Middle Constructions in Southeastern and Southwestern Kuki-Chin

Tuesday 26 September, 4-5:30pm, TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, sixth floor

Dr Chiu and Dr Ip make a donation to the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies for scholarships in the MPhil Chinese Studies for students from China and Hong Kong

Dr Jonathan KS Chiu, Trinity medical alumnus from the class of 1966 and his wife Dr Margaret Sau-Sheung Ip have kindly established a scholarship fund to support students from China and Hong Kong to come to Trinity to enroll on the MPhil in Chinese Studies over the next 5 years.

Tristan Brown (MIT) - The Unlikely Audiences of a Muslim King’s Shrine in China

Tuesday 16 May, 4-5pm, Trinity Long Room Hub, Neill Lecture Theatre

Tristan Brown (MIT) - Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China

Thursday 11 May, 4-5pm, Arts Building sixth floor, TRiSS Seminar Room

Sojin Lim (University of Central Lancashire) - International Aid and Sustainable Development in North Korea

Thursday 13 April, 6:30-7:30pm, Trinity College Dublin, Arts Building, Room 4047

Lingzi Zhuang (University of Toronto Mississauga) - A preliminary “mix-ology” of messy Tibetan verb paradigms

Wednesday 12 April, 4-5pm, Trinity Long Room Hub, Galbraith Room

Hannes A. Fellner (University of Vienna) - 名不正，則言不順– Language contact in the borderlands of the Western Regions

Friday 31 March, 4-5pm, Galbraith Room, Trinity Long Room Hub

Nathaniel Sims (CRLAO-CNRS) - A roadmap to reconstructing proto-Rma

Wednesday 22 March, 4-5pm, Arts Building, Room 4073

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel

Tuesday 21 February 2023, 6:30-7:30pm, online

Mel Cousins (Trinity College Dublin) - Getting old before getting rich? Challenges to the sustainability of the Chinese pension system

Friday 2 December 2022, 12-1pm, Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Arts Building Annex, Room 2012

Lecture: Raymond J. Davidson Jr. (Trinity College Dublin & Rowan University) - Zhuangzi and Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Cruelty

Friday 4 November 2022, 12-1pm, Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Arts Building Annex, Room 2012

A paleogenomic time travel to pre- and proto-historic Japan

Friday 21 October 2022, 12-1pm Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Arts Building Annex, Room 2012

The changing pronunciation of Chinese during the Han dynasty: applying graph theory to poetic rhymes

Friday 14 October, 10am-4pm, Trinity Long Room Hub, Neill Lecture Theatre

Sino-African Relations and the War in Ukraine

Wednesday 28 September 2022, 12-1pm, Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Arts Building Annex, Room 2012

Understanding the Constitution of Japan: comparison and analysis

Tuesday 30 August, 1:30-4:15pm

Webinar: Isabella Weber (University of Massachusetts Amherst) - Price Controls versus Economic Warfare: Hyperinflation and the Communist Revolution

Friday 1 April, 12-1pm

Webinar: Rebecca E. Karl (New York University) - The Socialist Law of Value and the Rural Economy: Wang Yanan and Marxism in China, 1950s

Friday 25 March, 12-1pm

Webinar: Edwin Michielsen (University of Toronto) - Celebrating the Proletariat: May Day Strikes and Syntheses of Solidarity

Friday 4 March, 12-1pm

PhD position in Gyalrongic (Sino-Tibetan) descriptive and historical linguistics

Deadline for application: 31st March 2022

Viren Murthy (University of Wisconsin Madison) - Back to the Future: Reflections on Tamil Marxism, Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Identity Politics

Friday 25 Feb, 4.30-5.30pm

Webinar: Li Shang (Swansea University) - A fresh look at Marx's understanding of the Asiatic mode of production

Friday 4 February 2022, 12-1pm

Webinar: Dr Yushu Geng - From Wise Mother/Good Wife to Tiger Mom: women in 20th century China

Tuesday 1st February 2022, 6pm

Webinar: Professor Nathan Hill - The word for 'tiger' in Chinese and other Asian languages

Monday 31st January 2022, 6pm

Webinar: Dr Dong Jin Kim - Global Health Diplomacy and North Korea: Ending the Quarantine of Humanitarianism in 2022

Friday 28 January 2022, 6pm

Webinar: Alexander Statman - Ancient Wisdom and Unhistorical History: Hegel's Encounter with Chinese Philosophy

Thursday 27 January 2022, 6-7pm

Webinar: Gerald Roche (La Trobe University) - Language Oppression in China: What Does it Look Like?

Friday 26 November, noon-1pm

Webinar: James Leibold (La Trobe University) - Taming Mongolia: Xi Jinping’s Agenda for Coercive Nation Building in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region

Friday 19 November, 11am-noon

Webinar: Dr Qi Zhang (Dublin City University) - The trilingual education for ethnic minorities: field studies of the Tujia, the Uyghurs and the Inner Mongolian

Friday 12 November, noon-1pm