Trinity Long Room Hub Podcasts

Recorded November 3rd, 2025. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on 15 November 1985, Behind the Headlines returns to debate whether this was a crucial stepping stone on the path to peace, or a controversial stumbling block. Bringing together experts from across the island, the panel re-examines the Agreement before the Good Friday Agreement, discusses what was so controversial at the time, and debates its impact and legacy. In particular, it explores the response of Unionist and Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland, the political fallout, and the mass protest campaign that followed. The event was chaired by Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Chair of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. Panel Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh, former Irish ambassador, who played a crucial role in the negotiation of the Agreement. Dr Shelley Deane, expert in Security and International Relations at the School of Law and Government in DCU and member of the ARINS project team. Sam McBride, Northern Ireland Editor, Belfast Telegraph Prof Michael Kerr, Professor of Conflict Studies, Kings College London Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded November 3rd, 2025. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Behind the Headlines revisits one of the most significant – and contested – moments in modern Irish history. In this special curated episode, Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Chair of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, speaks with an expert panel ahead of the Behind the Headlines event The Anglo-Irish Agreement: Its Making, Impact, and the People Behind It. Joining her are: Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh, former Irish ambassador, who played a crucial role in the negotiation of the Agreement. Dr Shelley Deane, expert in Security and International Relations at Dublin City University and member of the ARINS project team. Sam McBride, Northern Ireland Editor of the Belfast Telegraph. Professor Michael Kerr, Professor of Conflict Studies at King’s College London. Together, they explore the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the controversy it provoked, and its lasting legacy on politics across these islands. 🎧 Was the Anglo-Irish Agreement a crucial stepping stone on the path to peace — or a political stumbling block? Tune in to find out. The Behind the Headlines series is proudly supported by the John Pollard Foundation Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded October 2nd, 2025. Thinking Aloud, Thinking Together is a new series of live and recorded conversations amplifying voices that have been silenced in Irish cultural life. It gives space to artists, writers and thinkers who offer radical new perspectives on existing narratives. Our first conversation takes the form of a podcast series. Entitled 'In the Half Light: Voices from Black Ireland', this podcast is delivered in partnership with the Museum of Literature Ireland and curated by Dr Phil Mullen (Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Trinity College Dublin and a leading researcher on the historical experiences of 'mixed-race' people growing up in Ireland). Using the audio format, Phil has created an anonymised, open space for 'mixed-race' people who grew up in Irish care institutions to explore the impact of their erasure from institutional abuse history and discourse in Ireland. Through this conversation, she aims to undo that erasure, one voice at a time. Phil will be in conversation with journalist and researcher Caelainn Hogan. The conversation will be chaired by writer Eoin McNamee. This event is organised in partnership with the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Trinity Research in Social Sciences. Speakers Dr Phil Mullen is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and located in the Department of Sociology. She teaches on the Trinity elective which introduces students to the epistemology of Black Studies as an intellectual pursuit. This is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of knowledge that interrogates historical events that have impacted on those who are racialised as Black, while centring the perspectives of Black people in constructing and deconstructing these events. Sheleads a research project to recover the lived experiences and sociological impact of African students who came to Trinity in the early 20th century, which amplifies our understanding of Blackness in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Caelainn Hogan is a writer and journalist from Dublin. Her first book Republic of Shame investigates the ongoing legacy of Ireland's religious-run, state-funded institutions and the shame-industrial complex that incarcerated women and children. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, Harper's, The Washington Post, The Dublin Review and more. Eoin McNamee is a novelist and screenwriter. His nineteen novels include Resurrection Man and the Blue Trilogy. He has written six Young Adult novels including the New York Times bestselling The Navigator, and three thrillers under the John Creed pseudonym. He wrote the screenplay for the film Resurrection Man directed by Marc Evans and I Want You directed by Michael Winterbottom. His television credits include Hinterland (BBC Wales/Netflix) and An Brontanas (TG4). He has written seven radio plays for BBC R4. He is the Director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre and Co-Director of the M.Phil in Creative Writing Course at Trinity College Dublin. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded October 1st, 2025. A seminar by Dr Peter Rogers (Macquarie University, Australia) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series. This talk will discuss how to translate a travelling concept with different meanings for different audiences into practical and deliverable projects. Peter will highlight examples of projects that seek to build resilience, from physical infrastructure interventions to ways of working differently to identifying, analysing, preparing for, preventing, responding to and recovering from emergent challenges - such as mental health resilience in the age of climate change. The talk will highlight how no single approach can work everywhere, whilst awareness of the many faces of resilience can improve the coordination of common goals (and deliverable outcomes) for the diverse stakeholders seeking to build resilience, in one form or another. About the speaker: Peter is a social scientist with primary expertise in resilience, in all its forms. He is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Australia, and was Co-Director of 'Climate Futures' research centre from 2011-15. He has been an active researcher and consultant on resilience policy for many years. His published works include Resilience and the City (Ashgate. 2012) and The Everyday Resilience of the City (with Coaffee & Murakami-Wood. Palgrave, 2008). His forthcoming book on Resilience: Origins and Evolutions (Edward Elgar - 2026) brings together the disparate threads of his nearly 20 years of research on this topic into one volume. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded October 7th, 2025. A seminar by Prof Jarlath Killeen (School of English, TCD) as part of the English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series. "Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses."  The Picture of Dorian Gray opens in the studio of Basil Hallward in which the smells of an English garden at the start of summer mingle with the smoke of Lord Henry Wotton's opium-tinged cigarettes. This scent puts Dorian into a trance in which it is difficult, if not impossible for him, to resist the temptations offered: one located in Basil entrancing portrait, the other in Lord Henry’s mind-numbing peons to ever-blossoming youth and beauty. In this noxious atmosphere a new plant will grow, one even more dangerous than those that Hallward already has in the garden: the plant that is Dorian Gray. This talk will look at the ways in which Wilde has carefully used a Victorian language of the flowers throughout his novel as a way to dramatise the struggle between the forces of good and evil over Dorian's soul.  English Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series is a fortnightly meeting which has been integral to the School of English research community since the 1990s. The aim of the seminar series is to provide a relaxed and convivial atmosphere for staff and students to present their research to their peers. The series also welcomes distinguished guest lecturers from the academic community outside Trinity College to present on their work. It is a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and engage with the diverse research taking place within the School.  Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded October 15th 2025. The Trinity Long Room Hub is delighted to welcome author and historian William Dalrymple to present the 2025 Edmund Burke Lecture, entitled 'The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire', which is supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family. About William Dalrymple William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuściński award-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction) and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Bronze Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, The Golden Road, is a revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He is the co-host of the Empire podcast, which explores the intricate stories of revolutions, imperial wars, and the people who built and lost empires. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 26th, 2025. Government Science Advisor, Aoife McLysaght, joins a lively conversation with Hub Director Patrick Geoghegan on bridging research and public policy. Drawing on her career as a geneticist and public communicator and adviser, Dr McLysaght reflects on how Science and the Humanities can work together to shape understanding and create impact. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 26th, 2025. What does artificial intelligence mean for research in the Humanities? This panel brings together David Brown (the IRC-funded Empire project), Micheál O'Siochrú (History) and Hub Director Patrick Geoghegan to explore how AI is reshaping research, archives, and the way we think about the future. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 25th, 2025. Should Northern Ireland, or Ireland, have a new flag? David Michell and Etain Tannam (Peace Studies) explore this long-debated idea. A timely conversation on identity, representation, and national symbols. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded 22nd September 2025. This international history seminar focuses on the US, with Dan Geary (History) discussing 'Forgotten American Liberals: Why American Politics isn't all about Trump'. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded Monday 22nd September 2025. The Hub's Behind the Headlines series begins its second decade with a public discussion on the Irish Presidency. The panel is chaired by David Kenny (Law) and features Etain Tannam (Peace Studies), Declan Leddin (History), John Walsh (Education) and Gail McElroy (Political Science). Behind the Headlines is supported by the John Pollard Foundation. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 25th, 2025. Franciszek Krawczyk (Education) explores the role of the university in advancing international solidarity, comparing Trinity and the University of Warsaw and their geopolitical positions and legacies. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded Tuesday, 23rd of September 2025. Ben Jonson's claim that "Greek was free from Rime’s Infection" has echoed for centuries, although rejected by some. Leon Wash (Classics) revisits the debate, sharing striking evidence of rhyme in ancient Greek, including a poem about beer among the Celts. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 25th, 2025. Library staff share favourite finds from current projects. From autumnal windmills and apples to cartoons, maps and Michael Davitt’s favourite colour, come along for a celebration of the unexpected wonders in the archives. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 24th 2025. How do we locate books in time and place? Nicole Volmering (History) and the Trinity Centre for the Book invite you into the world of early medieval manuscripts for an interdisciplinary showcase exploring how we trace the movement of texts, through language, material, and meaning. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded Tuesday, 23rd September 2025. Join James Joyce expert Sam Slote (English) for a sharp look at censorship, copyright, and Ulysses in this festival edition of the School of English Staff and Postgrad Seminar Series. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded Monday 22nd September 2025. Gina Moxley and the creative team behind I Fall Down: A Restoration Comedy give us a behind-the-scenes look at this punk-feminist production taking place in Trinity as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Hosted by the School of Creative Arts Research Forum. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded Tuesday, 23rd Setpember 2025. Join Georgina Laragy (History) and Mandy Lee (Medicine) to explore past achievements and future directions for Trinity’s expanding Medical and Health Humanities Network. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 24th, 2025. Stephen O'Neill (English) looks at writing and partition in this festival edition of the Modern and Contemporary Irish History Seminar Series, hosted by Carole Holohan (History). Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Recorded September 23rd, 2025. From emojis in online condolences, to legendary goat-riding criminals and mapping wild urban plants, this panel (Shannon Mora, Noel Castro Fernandez, Nicole Basaraba, Ginevra Santivale and Vicky Garnett) explores how plants and animals are featuring across Trinity's digital humanities research. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub