On Oct. 29 at 6:30 p.m., two associate professors of English, Jenny Browne and Kathryn Santos, hosted five speakers from Belfast, Northern Ireland on the topic of Borders and Belonging: The Arts and Archives of Place. The Consul General of Ireland and four Irish authors discussed the role of the humanities when having conversations about community and belonging in the Margarite B. Parker Chapel.
Santos and Browne took a group of students to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the summer of 2024 and 2025. They came together to start a new study abroad program, starting in spring 2026: Trinity in Northern Ireland. Santos’s work focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, while Browne focuses on the British-Irish border that divides Ireland.
“It really grew out of our shared interest,” Santos said during the reception. “We thought it would be a really great opportunity to have a conversation about where those two places resonate with each other.”
The event started with an hour-long reception outside the chapel where students, guests and professors conversed. Four of the panel’s speakers visited from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Robert Hull, consul general of Ireland in Texas, was the fifth member of the panel. Speakers Glenn Patterson, Rachel Brown, Leontia Flynn and Dawn Watson were also included in the night’s program.
Once the reception concluded, the conversation moved inside the chapel. Browne welcomed Trinity students, professors and members of the San Antonio community. Before the panelists spoke, Browne offered opening remarks on Ireland’s current state.
“This might not directly change political or social circumstances, but it reclaims an inner freedom and resists despair,” Browne said.
Today, the government of Northern Ireland works together with the Republic of Ireland government under the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the Troubles. Hull spoke about what it means to him to represent the Irish government.
“The Irish governments are particularly focused on how we share our island, and also ensure that the different identities and traditions on the islands are represented in conversations,” Hull said. “Arts and culture are mirrors through which we, artists and audience, both represent, reflect and even reimagine who we are.”
Patterson spoke to the audience about the complexity of historical truth. Patterson is a writer and founding patron of Fighting Words Northern Ireland, a charity that aims to empower children through writing. He also wrote “The International,” a novel about a young man who witnessed the shooting that began the Troubles, a violent conflict that took place across Britain and Ireland between 1968–1998.
“Truth is not relative. Truth is composed in many parts, and each new piece of writing is like a little chip in the glass. To get the full picture, you need all those little bits, and any new bit of writing that you get gives you another perspective or changes the picture,” Patterson said. “And in a place like Northern Ireland, the place that I grew up, that thought was immensely liberative.”
Rachel Brown spoke more on what she perceived as forms of truth. She publishes under the collaborative artist name ‘Brown&Brí’ and examines general relativity through artistic methods.
“Reality is a set of possibilities until some decisive moment,” Brown said. “You can hold two opposing ideas in your head at once and they can both be true. And I always think that this must be what diplomacy is.”
Watson also spoke with students at the reception, and she is an award-winning poet, writer and lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. She shared that she hoped listeners would gain insights from the discussion on what it means to learn from other people.
Watson spoke about her collection of four poem-stories, “We Play Here”, and her written work on the Troubles. Watson wrote her collection through the eyes of four girls in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast. She said that while it wasn’t easy to write about this subject, it was important to shine a light on an aspect of British and Irish life that is neither beautiful nor attractive.
“I think it’s really nice to come together from such different places and talk about things we have in common, where we might get our inspiration from and how we might collectively feel hope and feel better,” Watson said.
To conclude the event, a conversation commenced between the audience and the panelists. Members of the audience passed around a microphone and posed their questions. Panelists and audience members spoke about what the US-Mexico border can learn from the history of Ireland, the Troubles and the progress that Ireland has made since.
