TLRH | Irish Universities and Imperial Legacies | The Global Irish Network at Trinity College Dublin

Recorded November 17, 2020. A panel discussion with the Global Irish Network in partnership with the Trinity Long Room Hub for Arts and Humanities Research This panel will address recent debates over Ireland’s links to the legacies of Empire, including the transatlantic slave economy, networks of cultural appropriation, and embedded financial inheritances, from the perspective of the Irish university and related institutions. The discussion will take its lead from current disputes over racial and imperial representations in the UK university system, notably, the controversy over the Rhodes Statue at Oriel College, Oxford, and extend these to an Irish context. In hosting this conversation, Trinity College, the oldest university on the island of Ireland, will foreground its own paradoxical allegiances: in the naming of its 1960s library building it pays tribute to philosopher George Berkeley, a one-time slave owner, but simultaneously it celebrates its association with prominent abolitionist Edmund Burke, whose statue flanks the front gate of the College. In these architectural gestures Trinity provides a springboard for wider questions: how should Irish educational and public institutions acknowledge their various imperial and colonial alliances, and to what extent should their current operations-- from capital to the curriculum -- be brought under continued scrutiny? Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/