Samuel Beckett Summer School

Now in its eighth year, the Samuel Beckett Summer School provides a unique experience for students, scholars and lovers of Beckett's works. Each year the world's foremost Beckett scholars are invited to present new lectures and seminars on all aspects of Beckett's works. The School appeals to a wide range of Beckett enthusiasts by providing the opportunity to experience, savour and study Beckett's works in the university where he began his intellectual life.

The Summer School is different from an academic conference in that it is not purely a gathering by specialists for other specialists. Instead, the goal is to engage and explore Beckett's works from a variety of different perspectives in order to examine and re-examine Beckett's evolving legacy and relevance. The aim of the Summer School is to look at Beckett in an open and pluralist fashion and to consider all of the numerous contexts of his work that are of interest both to the scholar and to the general reader.

The Samuel Beckett Summer School offers a full week of learning and is complemented by social and cultural events each evening.

Each morning will feature one or two lectures by leading Beckett scholars, or a special round-table plenary event. In the afternoons week-long seminars are run. Each student chooses one of four seminars and stays with that seminar for the full week. Seminars include: Beckett's Manuscripts; a Reading Group (the specific texts may change each year); Performance Workshop/Samuel Beckett Laboratory; and at least one special seminar whose topic will change each year (past examples include Beckett and Deleuze, Beckett and Dante, and Beckett and Irish Culture, 1929–1949). The range of seminar topics is meant to reflect the diverse ways in which Beckett's works can be approached, and are run by experts in those particular areas.

In addition to the academic programme, a range of activities, including social events, performances, field trips, an opening reception and a closing banquet are offered. All speakers are encouraged to attend the social events and discuss Beckett in more informal settings. Some of our additional events are open to the public and some are exclusive to participants of the Summer School.

Lecturers:

• Julie Bates: Husbanded Hypochondria: Illness and Creativity in Beckett's Fiction
• Linda Ben-Zvi: The Matter of Fundamental Sounds in Beckett's Theatre
• Anthony Cordingley: ‘The lugworms of understanding’: Revisiting Beckett and Leibniz
• Georgina Nugent-Folan: In the Name of the Father? Reconsidering Gender in Beckett's Autographic Writing
• Pim Verhulst: ‘Look with thine ears’: King Lear and Blindness in Beckett's Radio Drama
• Feargal Whelan: ‘Seventy miles away by your Longman’: The Exile's Gaze in Early Beckett

Plenary Panel: Beckett and Disability (Siobhán Purcell, Julie Bates, Jonathan Heron, Declan Treanor)

Seminars:

• The Philosophy of How It Is (Anthony Cordingley)
• Samuel Beckett's Female Contemporaries (Georgina Nugent-Folan)
• Beckett's Manuscripts (Mark Nixon & Dirk Van Hulle)
• Performance Workshop/Samuel Beckett Laboratory (Nicholas Johnson & Jonathan Heron)
• Reading Group – The Trilogy (Sam Slote)

Performance:
Company SJ presents a special preview of COMPANY by Samuel Beckett

Beckett Pub Quiz (Mark Nixon)

Student Symposium: 5 August 2018
The 2018 Summer School will host an additional symposium featuring research and discussion by participants in the school, on the Sunday following the activities of the school. We hope that this enhances the opportunity for current students and researchers to engage and reflect on their activities, and is the first step toward making the Summer School a credit-bearing course. Please contact [email protected] for enquiries related to the symposium, or express your interest on the registration form.

APPLY: email

[email protected]

for 2018 Application Form.

The Beckett Summer School began in 2011 as a project of the School of English and the School of Creative Arts at Trinity College Dublin. Since 2017, it forms a core part of the activities of the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, formed by a partnership between those two schools, the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies, and the Trinity Library. The Summer School is housed on campus at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, which also hosts the research centre.