Trinity Long Room Hub welcomes new International Visiting Fellows

The Trinity Long Room Hub is pleased to announce the international fellows joining us in early 2025:

Piotr Wciślik, Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk (IBL PAN), Poland

Dr Piotr Wciślik from The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences will work on his project ‘Fostering collaboration in digital humanities and resistance studies: towards data-rich history of unlicensed print culture in Poland’ during his fellowship in early 2025. The purpose of this project is to finalise a digital scholarly edition of a bibliographic dataset on Polish samizdat (the self-publishing of materials censored by the government in the former Soviet Union) books, and to explore it through computational analysis, graph and map visualisation in Nodegoat (a web-based data management). Dr Wciślik’s fellowship is in partnership with Dr Krzystof Rowiński, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies and the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities.

Upcoming event: Dr Piotr Wciślik will deliver a talk on Tuesday, 1st April at 4pm as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies seminar in the Neill Lecture Theatre.

Bruce Shapiro, University of Columbia, United States

Professor Bruce Shapiro is Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and was previously a participant and advisor to joint Columbia-Hub conferences on humanities and the crisis in democracy initiatives. As part of the Trinity Long Room Hub-Heyman fellowship, Professor Shapiro will focus on research for his current book project Aftershock Journalism: The Revolution in Reporting on Violence, which is under contract with Columbia University Press. He will look at the changing role of reporting on trauma in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, on such issues as clerical and institutional abuse, the Troubles, forced migration and gendered violence among others, as well as the role of public storytelling about trauma and critical incidents in democratic reform and resisting authoritarian populism.

Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne, Australia

Returning fellow Professor Ronan McDonald joins us from the University of Melbourne where he holds the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies. In an age of social media and the so-called ‘attention economy’ his project will look at ‘Critical Attention: Neurohumanities, Close-Reading and the Distraction Economy.’ This neurohumanities project builds links between literary studies and cognitive science by looking at literary and literary critical notions of attention and distraction. Professor McDonald’s fellowship is in partnership with Professor Chris Morash, School of English and Professor Shane O'Mara, Neuroscience, TCD.

Upcoming event: Professor McDonald will join Professor Morash and Professor O’Mara to discuss his research in our upcoming ‘Fellow in Focus’ on Thursday, 13 February at 5pm in the Neill Lecture Theatre. Pay Attention!: Literary Studies, Neurohumanities and the ‘Distraction Economy’

Nina Lamal, Huygens Instituut, The Netherlands

Dr Nina Lamal joins the Trinity Long Room Hub for a project on ‘The Fagel Collection as a Tool of Statecraft’, from February to March 2025. She is an early modern historian based at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam.  In collaboration with the Library of Trinity College Dublin and Dr Mark Faulkner from Trinity’s School of English and the Centre for the Book, this project asks how the unique Fagel Library in Dublin functioned as a tool of statecraft for the powerful Fagel family in the eighteenth century. Drawing on recent digitization and cataloguing projects, the proposed research uses book historical methods to bring the library into dialogue with the Fagel archives in The Hague and to study how it was used for political education, referencing and networking.

Valmont Layne, University of Western Cape, South Africa

As part of the Charlotte Maxeke Mary Robinson Chair in Irish Studies, Dr Valmont Layne will join us from March-June 2025 for the inaugural Trinity Long Room Hub TCD - Centre for Humanities Research UWC Visiting Research Fellowship. Dr Layne is a musician and researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. He is also the Programme Director for New Archival Visions at the University of the Western Cape. He is currently working on a monograph based on his doctoral thesis titled "Goema's Refrain: Cape Jazz and the Slave Archive."

Susan Pedersen, University of Columbia, United States

Susan Pedersen, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia, will join the Trinity Long Room Hub in April 2025 to work on her current book project on the Balfour family and particularly, the chapter on ‘Gerald and Betty Balfour in Ireland, 1895-1900’. Gerald Balfour was chief secretary for Ireland in his uncle Lord Salisbury’s administration. Professor Pedersen will engage with historians of late 19th century Irish politics to further research on  the Balfour family between the 1880s and the 1930s.