As is now customary, we started the festival with a number of questions, including, how do you know you’re human?, how big is microhistory? And, is it time to give things back? The researchers took these questions and turned them on their heads. With the second year of the festival now a wrap, we’ve ended with many more (and some surprising) questions: What is the sound of a prince being born in the Middle Ages? What is humane? Why does history keep forgetting that women were there? Was there anything revolutionary about The Beatles? Have we been asking the wrong questions about AI?
The festival week began with an exploration of what we can learn about childhood through literature and history. Isabella Jackson sat down with Ciaran O’Neill from the Department of History to discuss her Irish Research Council laureate project CHINACHILD which began in 2018. Looking at the cases of slave girls in twentieth century China (mui tsai) Isabella explored some of the wider conceptions of childhood in the Chinese context. Continuing the theme of childhood, author Sheena Wilkinson explained to Padraic Whyte from the School of English why the ‘school story’ continues to have appeal today and how she hopes to recapture the magic of the boarding school setting in her new book First Term at Fernside. In the panel discussion ‘Just Kids?’, early career researchers Rebecca Easler, Tony Flynn, Lorraine McEvoy, and Ellen Orchard looked at how children are depicted in texts, from Charles Dickens’ preoccupation with death in children’s lives to how childhood is represented in modern Irish poetry showing us how, as Ellen noted, “children are so often the collateral damage of Irish history.” Jane Carroll (English) picked up the children’s theme later in the week with a look at fashion or ‘self-fashioning’ in children’s comics.
Turning to the Northern Irish border and the launch of a new online archive from the Border Culture Project, on Monday evening, Eve Patten shared with the audience how, in the wake of Brexit and amidst a Covid lockdown spent near the Fermanagh-Donegal border, she was conscious of the gap between the political and reductive focus on the border and the flourishing grass-roots activities and vibrancy at local level that told a different story. She wondered what difference it would make if we were to view the border as a ‘cultural borderscape’? Teaming up with Garrett Carr of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, the Border Culture Project was born, guided by the expert curation of the project’s research fellow Orla Fitzpatrick. Rita Duffy, one of the visual artists featuring on the new website, spoke of “imagining the border out of existence” and her plans for a “border biennale”.
Eve Patten, Orla Fitzpatrick and Garrett Carr
Later on Monday evening the festival previewed the new Irish language film ‘Iarsmaí’ (Remnants), taking a close look at Ireland’s colonial entanglements, through Trinity’s return of human remains to the island of Inishbofin and through museum collections across the island. One attendee found the film “moving” and noted how the documentary “took a very thorny issue (repatriation of cultural artifacts) and looked at it on a very real, human scale.” Attendees also participated in a discussion with Producer Deaglán Ó Mocháin and Ciaran O’Neill of Trinity’s Colonial Legacies Project who also features in the film.
Last year the festival benefited enormously from the contribution of PhD students and Postdocs from Trinity’s Arts and Humanities and this year was no different. Participating in the Thesis in Three discussions, researchers were tasked with explaining their research in just a few minutes, while they also engaged in ‘booth-banters’ in the arts building and one-on-one conversations with curious passersby. Getting into the festival spirit, a team of enthusiastic orange clad PhD researchers could also be seen throughout the week in the Arts Building and around Fellows Square encouraging people to ask about the festival or their own research. As one person observed, “chatting with researchers really brings their work to life.”
But why should researchers make their research public? And what is a ‘public historian’? That was the question at Tuesday’s coffee morning when Patrick Geoghegan from the Department of History and host of the popular radio show and podcast ‘Talking History’ spoke to staff and students (and some dedicated fans) about bringing research to a wider audience. Public History alumni Caitlin White (Department of Education) and Greg Walls discussed their work on the ‘Society & State – Ireland Through Its Records’ exhibition covering a century of Irish history.
As part of the festival’s ‘Plaster, Wood and Stone’ panel, we were treated to two fabulous presentations by Billy Shortall and Christine Casey from the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Billy described the research that informed another recent exhibition, that of Irish modern sculptor Hilary Heron at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). With tales of her solo travels to post-war Paris from Dublin on a motorbike, he noted how Heron was a “gregarious” figure who has largely been overlooked in Irish art history despite her work achieving international recognition.
“We’re all stone-mad”, said Christine Casey speaking of her four-year Irish Research Council Laureate CRAFTVALUE project which looked at the agency and impact of craftmanship in the architecture of Britain and Ireland from 1680-1780. Like most projects, Christine commented, CRAFTVALUE emerged from recognising the gaps in the existing history and trying to gain an understanding of the wider experience of architecture in the city, “in lesser figures, in materials and alternative narratives.”
“That’s what history is, trying to find new ways of looking at things”, said Christine who also spoke briefly about the vision behind her new ambitious project ‘Stone-work’, which in 2023 was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant.
Christine Casey and Billy Shortall
Indeed, if you’ve ever considered what daily life was like in the Middle Ages, you mightn’t have thought of sound as the first place to look. What is the sound of a prince being born? What is the sound of the death of a king? And what is the sound of a crusading army? These were just some of the questions Philippa Byrne, Department of History, had for festivalgoers in her fascinating talk on ‘Listening for the Middle Ages’.
The festival also reached online audiences with a number of talks livestreamed including Patrick Houlihan’s talk on ‘Disaster and Hope’. Looking at humanitarianism between the World Wars, audiences were prompted to consider fundamental questions such as “what is humane?” Patrick suggested that the legacy of war is not just destruction but also aid, noting that “history judges both action and inaction.”
Also going out to an online and in-person audience, visiting research fellow Chris Danta sat down with Christopher Morash from the School of English to have a wide-ranging conversation around the “tech-saturated” world in which we live and the relationship between humans and machines. How can literature help us understand our relationship to machines? Through metaphor and attention to language, the visiting fellow noted. Chris joins the Trinity Long Room Hub from the School of Cybernetics at Australian National University where he is currently working on a project titled ‘Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence.’
Speaking of metaphors, what did werewolves and vampires represent in popular culture throughout time? According to Peter Arnds, Department of Germanic Studies, werewolves had a lot to do with exclusion and race, and the fear of immigrants while Jarlath Killeen, School of English, said that vampires (who have been given a Hollywood facelift) have been thought to represent very many things, from disease to sexuality. Continuing the theme of all things creepy in Tuesday’s panel discussion, Nicole Basaraba, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, explored the phenomenon of ‘ghost-hunters’ on YouTube and the impacts of this new form of dark tourism.
State-of-the-art Digital Humanities projects also featured heavily across the week including a coffee morning with Trinity’s Dean of Research Sinead Ryan, where researchers Nicole Basaraba, Vicky Garnett, Pat Treusch, Vera Yakupova, and Ginevra Sanvitale shared insights on the DARIAH-EU project, led by Dariah National coordinator Jennifer Edmond and their work with MOZART, an interdisciplinary research project on soft robotics innovation for food industry automation. Later in the week Ginevra also delved into what broiler chickens have got to do with race and nation-building in Italy and the USA. In this food-focused discussion, she was joined by Leon Walsh (Classics) who gave a fascinating talk on premodern understandings of wine.
Returning for a second year, the Library ‘quick picks’ proved as popular as ever as the audience got to hear first-hand from Library staff about their favourite items from the collections. Getting started with a 15th century anti-plague recipe, Claire McNulty pulled out all the stops for a live recipe demo. Attendees heard about the “rock-star style of devotion” St Alban had as Estelle Gittins presented her ‘eye-popping’ manuscript --the medieval masterpiece of Matthew Paris; and describing it as a “gateway to filth”, Terry MacDonald revealed the secrets of Trinity’s banned books room providing much amusement for the audience. Hanna De Lange picked a book from the prized Fagel collection, which was also the subject of a Library visit for attendees on Wednesday when Maria Elisa Navarro Morales, Department of History of Art and Architecture, presented her project on the virtual reconstruction of the Fagel House, an 18th century building in the Hague. Other library highlights were presented by Roy Stanley (on Lutheran Hymns), Helen Bradley (on composer and poet Léo Ferré), Jane Maxwell (on children in the archives), and Ciara Daly (on Brendan Kennelly).
From the written word and the library collections to ‘Writing in the Streets’, a panel discussion from Trinity’s Centre for the Book led by Mark Faulkner (English) explored graffiti in Pompeii (Charlie Kerrigan), Irish script in the streetscape (Nicole Volmering), and political stickers on Dublin lampposts (Anna Pitts). Speaking of the “Latin of the streets”, Charlie Kerrigan from the Department of Classics showed how in Pompeii, the volcano “didn’t discriminate” in preserving its “terrible history.” With striking visual examples of engravings showing the urgency in their messages, Charlie highlighted how graffiti in Pompeii, as it is today, allowed people to express alternative ideas, the things they can’t read in newspapers.
Should lawyers read literature? And what difference would it make? In David Kenny’s popular talk ‘From Henry James to Start Wars: why lawyers should read literature?’, the head of Trinity’s School of Law made the case for lawyers moving away from “narrow” reading and returning to the books and to stories which would inform pragmatic aspects of the law. From Hilary Mantel to Ian McEwan, these themes are explored further in David’s new book Pragmatism, Law, and Literature.
David Kenny
The literary capabilities of women between 1760 and 1810 was the focus of Amy Prendergast’s ‘Mere Bagatelles-Women’s Diaries’ talk which is based on the work of her new book of the same title: Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810. With extensive archival research, Amy presented some of the diary entries allowing the audience to see how these women chose to present themselves for an imagined public readership. How cases of rape and sexual violence are treated by the law today and the way sexual violence has been treated throughout Irish history was the focus of Lindsey Earner Byrne’s talk on ‘difficult histories.’ In her poignant talk Lindsey spoke of her own journey towards embracing ‘micro-histories’ as she spoke of the case of ‘Mary M’, and her letter in the archives providing an account of her rape during the Irish civil war. For years, she said she did not know how to tell Mary M’s story before highlighting how “if we don’t write difficult histories, then we’re left with silence and silence makes a really brutal noise of its own.” Stories of women’s resilience was the feature of Wednesday’s showcase from the Trinity Modern and Contemporary History Seminar. The new Network for the Study of Resilient Women was introduced in a panel by Deirdre Foley with contributions from researchers Susan Byrne, Lorraine McEvoy and Conor Murphy, showing how these women (including those “with no support and a bad reputation”) survived “in their own time”.
Lindsey Earner Byrne and Amy Prendergast
It is these “complex histories” that resonated most with one festival attendee. For another it was the opportunity to participate alongside invited speakers at Thursday’s evening’s long-table discussion asking ‘What is a 21st century person?’ Hosted by Nicholas Johnson of the Department of Drama Studies, the panel considered what major factors have fed into contemporary personhood. Starting with a historical view, Jane Ohlmeyer commented that the pre-modern notion of the person was dominated by men while contributions from Neville Cox (Law), Shane O’Meara (Neuroscience), Clodagh Brook (Italian), Jacob Erickson (Religion), and others allowed for a wide-ranging conversation an how we can understand personhood today from a legal and religious perspective and in relation to the non-human, be that animal or machine.
While we often hear about the ideas we should be implementing for the benefit of our natural environment, a discussion on Thursday from Trinity’s Centre for Environmental Humanities prompted us to look at the history of bad ideas about climate and nature from ‘Spaceship Earth’ (Tim Scott) to geoengineering (Francis Ludlow). Speaking on the panel, Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, went one step further when he showed how some interventions that humans make to the environment may also be “interpreted” by other beings. In his research into deforestation in Brazil, he found that leaf-cutting ant populations expanded and he’s now interested in how--in-turn--the expansion of ant colonies has affected human settlement. Meanwhile Katja Bruisch showed how wetland reclamation and draining of wetlands widely promoted in the late 19th century and across the 20th century led to the destruction of habitats in wetlands in Europe (but most intensively in the Soviet Union), which now represent “powerful agents and sites of climate change” from soil carbon emissions to wild-fires and flooding. The challenges of communicating environmental research was the subject of the early career research led-Environmental Humanities Open Forum earlier that day.
From environmental humanities to medical humanities, attendees particularly enjoyed “the bridging of different fields in these talks”. Bringing the latest research from Trinity’s Medical and Health Humanities Network, Des O’Neill (Medicine) discussed the huge interest in this inter-disciplinary area and noted that “Trinity has the longest-running series of seminars in medical and health humanities in a university in Ireland.”
Making bridges outside of the university was also a key theme in Provost Linda Doyle’s conversation with Director of the Hub Eve Patten when they sat down as part of Wednesday’s informal coffee morning. Speaking on the EU and national funding landscape and the need for sustainable funding for third-level in Ireland, the Provost also said that she was concerned about the polarisation of researchers (and society more generally) and that we must continue, in the academic setting, to be deeply attuned to what’s going on in the geopolitical environment. The new Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Carmel O’Sullivan also spoke passionately at Friday’s coffee morning about her engagement with the arts and performative arts as part of her research approach in the School of Education. Later that day she led the TCD Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences choir on the steps on the Hub in their performance of some classic hits. On Wednesday’s coffee morning, Mairead Hurley, also from Education, shared her collaborative project ‘Stories of the Air’, which brings together storytelling, local knowledge and atmospheric science.
Eve Patten with Provost Linda Doyle
This year’s festival featured a number of film’s including a new documentary ‘We will Remain’ on the threatened Bedouin communities of the West Bank followed by discussion with Brendan Browne (Religion) in his role as Executive Producer. Presented by Hub former artist-in-residence Mairead McClean in conversation with Jennifer O’Meara (Film), ‘Acts of Memory’ explored the story of Ireland’s Public Record Office and its destruction during the Irish civil war only to be virtually reconstructed a century later. The research for Acts of Memory was conducted during 2021-22 while Mairéad McClean was Artist in Residence with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland and the Trinity Long Room Hub as part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-23, through the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Trinity’s expert Assyriologist and recent ERC awardee Martin Worthington showed extracts from his new film with his student participants about the recovery of the ancient Sumerian language. Meanwhile the School of Creative Arts Research Forum with early career researchers Victor Morozov, Cáit Murphy and Jaka Lombar looked at all things film and new media.
From opera and a discussion about composer Charles Stanford on Tuesday evening’s ‘Theatre within Theatre’ in partnership with Wexford Festival Opera to a full day of music celebration as part of the festival finale ‘Key Changes’, this year’s festival put the creative arts front and centre. Coming back to the theme of silences in history, Nicole Grimes, Department of Music, kicked off a music-themed Friday by highlighting some of the gaps in our knowledge of women in music from the 19th century to the present. Asking “how does history keep forgetting women were there?”, Professor Grimes showed how women composers have been largely absent from our global stages, and the history of women’s music consistently kept to the margins.
Taking a deep dive into the fundamentals of AI and copyright law, Eoin O’Dell (Law) took us through some of the most high-profile music cases from Pink Floyd to Ed Sheeran, and how ‘copyright innovator’ Taylor Swift is re-recording her own music. Outlining how punk music was conditioned by the social, cultural and political conditions of the time, Balazs Apor, (Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies) spoke of the legacies of the 1980s musical underground and the more recent revival of punk in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He said that punk music has allowed for an “immediacy of cultural response” following a political rupture.
Jonathan Hodgers, Darryl Jones and James Denis McGlynn
Was there anything revolutionary about The Beatles? asked Darryl Jones (English) as he kicked off the ‘Welcome to the Sixties’ panel. Setting the scene for The Beatles’ political and cultural upbringing, he noted how all of the Beatles were born into a Britain of war, and one characterised by austerity and conformity but “this was all about to change.” In telling the story of the band, Darryl traced the social and political history of 1960s and 1970s Britain. Jonathon Hodgers (Music) introduced his new book about Bob Dylan and film, Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals and heavy metal was the subject of the grand finale ‘Going out with a (Head) Bang)’. Leading the panel, Philip Coleman (English) recounted his early metal days as he invited all the speakers (Richard Duckworth and Eimear Rouine (TCD), Ron Davies (UCD), and Elizabeth Boyle (Maynooth)) to share what their ‘gateway’ to metal was. From there the panel explored different genres and subgenres of metal, questioning the (at times) “goofy” and the “silly” and perhaps converting a few audience members along the way. What better way to end the festival, and celebrate Researcher’s Night across campus, than with a growl and a head bang!
Listen to the festival playlist now: