Name: TCAS Lecture: Isabella Jackson
Start: 2026-02-19T13:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-19T14:00:00+00:00
Location: Trinity Long Room Hub

Classical Chinese Gardens through the Centuries and in Dublin's St Anne's Park
About this Event

This event is co-organised by the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies (TCAS) and the TCD Department of History, and forms part of the Dublin City Council Lunar New Year celebrations 2026.

Speaker: Isabella Jackson
Date and time: Thursday, 19 February 2026, 1pm-2pm
Venue: Trinity Long Room Hub

Book Tickets:

Hidden in St Anne's Park is a beautiful classical Chinese garden, designed and built with expert input from craftsmen from Suzhou, the home of classical gardens in China. This lecture will explore how these gardens developed over time from the first recorded gardens in 400 BCE to the present. It will analyse their significance and symbolism, with reference to the features in the Irish-Suzhou Garden in St Anne's Park.

Isabella Jackson has worked at Trinity since 2015, after lecturing at the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. She researches modern Chinese history, including the colonial history of the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of Chinese childhood and the history of breastfeeding and infant feeding in China. She was Principal Investigator on Irish Research Council Laureate Grant CHINACHILD: Slave-girls and the Discovery of Female Childhood in Twentieth-century China (2018-24). Together with a team of researchers, she explored how controversies over keeping unpaid domestic servants (binü 婢女 or mui tsai) reflected changing and expanding conceptions of Chinese childhood.