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/