Location (geographical and organisational)
Even after what can be seen as its founding moment in 1959, it took time for the Department to acquire a definite home. When Patrick Keatinge arrived as a lecturer in 1963 he was assigned an office in the Rubrics, the oldest buildings on the campus, while head of department Basil Chubb was in a separate building in New Square. At a later stage in the 1960s department staff moved to more or less contiguous office space on the upper two floors in House 6, near the main entrance to Trinity's campus, subsequently the base of the Students' Union and the student-run Trinity FM radio station. In 1978 the department relocated to the then-new Arts Building, occupying rooms on the 3rd floor, the departmental office being Room 3072, with the head of department in 3073 and other lecturers in rooms 3055 to 3058. In 1998 it moved again, this time to a new location off campus, adjacent to the Temple Bar area, in 1 College Green. The Department occupies the top two floors of the building, with sweeping views across the city skyline taking in College Green, the Millennium Spire, Croke Park and the Hill of Howth (plus the Phoenix Park from a few west-facing offices), though these views are being progressively obscured by the growth of the trees in Foster Place. There are details of how to find us on our contact page. Much of the Department's teaching still takes place in the Arts Building.
Prior to the creation of the faculty structure in 1969, the embryonic department had no fixed place in the scheme of things, and staff were listed in several places in the College Calendar, according to the programmes on which they taught rather than by departmental affiliation per se. For example, in the 1965–66 College Calendar Chubb and Thornley are listed under both 'History and political science' and 'Business and Social Studies', while Chubb, Keatinge and Thornley are listed under 'Economics and political science'. Trinity's adoption of a faculty-based structure as from 1969 brought some order and hierarchy to the relationship between different units and areas. There were six faculties, and the Department of Political Science was situated within what came to be called the Faculty of Business, Economic and Social Studies (BESS). The faculty was originally named the 'Faculty of Social Sciences', being renamed 'Faculty of Economic and Social Studies' in 1970 and taking the name 'Faculty of Business, Economic and Social Studies' in 1988; unhelpfully, Political Science was more or less invisible in each of these titles. This continued to be the position until the 2005 dissolution of the existing faculty structure and its replacement by a series of Schools. The Department is now a member of the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy, along with the Departments of Economics, Philosophy, and Sociology. The school is, in turn, a member of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (one of three faculties across the College).