has been transformed radically by the ongoing crisis of Embracing a community outside of Trinity’s city COVID-19. As Patten explains, “Like other academies, centre campus is key to the Long Room Hub’s agenda, the Long Room Hub had to shift its operations online particularly in “an intellectual climate where we have very quickly.” The institute moved planned events moved far away from the idea of a university as an online and scheduled new ones that would respond ivory tower. A great deal of what we do at the institute to immediate contemporary concerns. They streamed a “We are keen to play a is embedded in a commitment to the public humanities. We series of discussions based on the theme of ‘Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic’, in partnership with the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia leading role in animating intellectual questions for a wider audience outside the university and to responding to the public’s are keen to play a leading role in animating intellectual questions for a wider audience outside the university and to responding to the public’s interests and needs.” Patten cites a number University. “We also set up a COVID-19 Crisis blog that interests and needs.” of public humanities ventures from the successful ‘Behind the looked at the pandemic from all Headlines’ series to a recent aspects of life: education, the environment, the justice collaboration between researchers at the Hub and the system,” Patten says. Recent entries to the ongoing community radio station Near FM, which broadcast series include articles on religion and public health, a six-part series of lectures called ‘Women’s Stories’, the language of the pandemic, even Joyce and social co-produced by Trinity researchers. In another distancing. The blogs serve as an archive of academic recent event, the 2019 Annual Humanities Horizons engagement at this troubling time and also provides Lecture, the Hub hosted Professor Anthea Butler from a record of lockdown experiences from across the the University of Pennsylvania, who illustrated the Trinity community during an unprecedented episode connections between white-nationalist ideologies in the university’s history. As Patten puts it, “We are and social media algorithms in a powerful assessment living through history. As well as analysing it as it of the politics of online culture. “This sharing of unfolds, we can be involved in recording it.” intellectual ideas in an accessible and democratic Patten describes how the new virtual imperative of life during COVID-19 has also had a positive impact way,” Patten says, “helps explain the world as it is to us now.” on the way in which the Long Room Hub’s future is From a global perspective, meanwhile, relationships taking shape. “One of the ironies of moving from beyond Trinity’s core community are crucial from being rooted in a physical building to operating the point of view of research-exchange, and this has online,” she says, “is that it has increased participation political as well as intellectual connotations, as enormously. We have been able to bring in a vast Patten elaborates. community of friends and colleagues from across the globe, in different times-zones. We have been able to Click here to read the rest of the article extend the reach of what we do.” Sara Keating is a cultural journalist with The Irish Times and the Business Post. She graduated from the School of English in 2001; Eve Patten supervised her undergraduate thesis in 2001. She was awarded a PhD from the Samuel Beckett School of Drama in 2006.