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mean? It is a mystery that, so far, remains unsolved. Our folio is a ‘used book’ in the sense that it shows the signs of the life it lived before it arrived in college. But it is a used book in another sense as well. It is held in the collection to preserve it for posterity, but it is also held as a working resource. Every year I take my students across to see it and we examine it carefully, noting its characteristics and its history. For our students, this means that they have the opportunity to experience the book literally at first hand, to turn the pages, to feel the presence of past readers in the traces they have left of themselves within the volume. In the process, we find ourselves connected with the past of the book itself, but also with our proud tradition of teaching Shakespeare over hundreds of years. Trinity student Niamh O’Farrell Tyler recites Caliban’s famous ‘isle is full of noises’ speech from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the Long Room of Trinity’s Old Library. Click here to see the online exhibition Click here to see the digitised copy of the folio
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The power of collaboration Dr Amelia McConville shares her experience of navigating the complexities of interdisciplinary research which aims to broach the once paradigmatic divide between poetry studies and science I have always been interested in the combination of the arts and the sciences. While my BA was in English Literature and Philosophy, this interest was piqued especially during a philosophy of science module I took as an undergraduate. I decided to approach doctoral studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, and explore how poetry and cognitive science might be brought into conversation with one another. I was extremely fortunate to have the support of my primary supervisor Professor Philip Coleman from the School of English, who put me in touch with Professor Mani Ramaswami from the Institute of Neuroscience – they had both been discussing the potential of a collaborative approach to poetry and neuroscience, and so my doctoral project came into being. Under the auspices of Trinity’s burgeoning Neurohumanities culture, I embarked on this interdisciplinary project to broach the once paradigmatic divide between poetry studies and science. The concept of a scientist only replaced the term ‘natural philosopher’ in the 19th century, so I first investigated the background of the supposed historical separation between literature and science, finding plenty of inspiring instances of cross-fertilisation of disciplines. This route also led me to a fascinating historical debate about the differences between poetry and painting, dating back to Horace’s dictum Ut Pictura Poesis (‘as is painting, so is poetry’) which led me to my project’s more specific focus on visual poetry – or the visual in poetry – how the visual presentation of a poem on the page or screen might affect, or even, define its meaning. Approaching this complex literary question from a Neurohumanities perspective therefore evolved naturally to become the main challenge of my PhD, by appealing to an understanding of how we process visual and verbal content on a cognitive
