Bram Stoker

The affable and popular theater manager Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Ireland, to Abraham and Charlotte Stoker in 1847, into an Irish Protestant (although not Anglo-Irish) family. After a sickly childhood he grew into a robust sportsman, and attended Trinity College Dublin from 1864 to 1866, finally graduating with a BA in 1870. Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Irish Civil Service in 1866, where he had the opportunity to travel around Ireland as a clerk of Petty Sessions, while also becoming an unpaid theater reviewer for the Dublin Evening Mail from 1871 to 1878, and publishing his first short story, “The Crystal Cup,” in London Society 1872. This he followed with a short novel, The Primrose Path, and two short stories, “The Chain of Destiny” and “Buried Treasures,” all in the periodical The Shamrock in 1875. In 1878 he left Dublin with his wife Florence to take up the position of acting manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London, and fulfilled this role until Irving’s death in 1905, also managing several American tours. In the earlier part of this period, Stoker managed to publish more fiction, including a first collection of short stories, Under the Sunset (1881), and then his first truly accomplished novel, The Snake’s Pass, set in rural Ireland, in 1890. Short but memorable pieces, “The Squaw” and “The Man from Shorrox,” appeared in periodicals in 1893 and 1894, and then two novels, The Watter’s Mou’, based on his knowledge of Cruden Bay near Aberdeen, and The Shoulder of Shasta, both 1895. Dracula, his most famous work, the product of seven years of research and rewriting, appeared in 1897, followed by a Restoration-era romance of much less merit, Miss Betty, in 1898. The Edwardian era saw his rate of productivity increase with The Mystery of the Sea (1902), another romance set in Cruden Bay, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a Gothic “mummy” story, The Man (1905), Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving in 1906 (his most successful work in sales terms), and Lady Athlyne and Snowbound (a collection of theatrical short stories), both in 1908. His final, post-theater years were beset with ill health and monetary problems, as he resorted to journalism to supplement his income. However, he also produced the topical Balkan romance The Lady of the Shroud in 1909, and the chaotic The Lair of the White Worm in 1911, before dying the next year, his vibrant personality quietly mourned by London society.

Interview with Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo

Emily Ruth Allen interviews Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo on Festive Devils of the Americas (2015). Interview date: Feb 4, 2021 Milla Cozart Riggio is James J. Goodwin Professor of English Emerita at Trinity College. Angela Marino is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Paolo Vignolo is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Colombia, Bogota

Target Oxbridge Year 10 programme

Target Oxbridge is Rare Recruitment's programme to help students with black African and Caribbean heritage to increase their chances of getting into Cambridge or Oxford Universities. Target Oxbridge and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, launched a unique programme called the Target Oxbridge Year 10 programme to demystify the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford in order to help more 14 and 15 year olds of black heritage prepare to apply to and gain places at these leading universities. This new programme for students in Year 10 featured webinars with Trinity College academics and students, and Target Oxbridge alumni provided advice to Year 10 black British students who are considering attending university. The webinars aimed to demystify Oxford and Cambridge Universities, offer insights into what college life is really like, provide information on the application process, and offer guidance on preparing applications. Students also learned about how degree subject choice can affect their career options. This article provides an evaluation report on the Programme's effectiveness.

Grigorij Krużkow – poezji anglojęzycznej tłumacz niestrudzony

Twórczość Grigorija Krużkowa jest ze wszech miar godna opisu i popularyzacji. To ceniony i nagradzany rosyjski tłumacz poezji anglojęzycznej, teoretyk przekładu, profesor w Katedrze Teorii i Praktyki Przekładu Rosyjskiego Państwowego Uniwersytetu Humanistycznego w Moskwie. Jest m.in. autorem obszernej antologii przekładów 115 angielskich, irlandzkich i amerykańskich poetów oraz wyboru angielskich i irlandzkich wierszy i bajek. W 2015 roku otrzymał tytuł doktora honoris causa Trinity College w Dublinie. Widzi on pracę tłumacza jako twórczość, która rodząc się z miłości i jedności duchowej z autorem oryginału, może zapewnić temu ostatniemu nieśmiertelność w innych językach. Do tego właśnie nawiązują wyraźnie tytuły jego esejów. Co ciekawe, na polskim gruncie analogiczne wnioski formułuje z wielkim przekonaniem Wiesław Myśliwski, podkreślając, że tłumacz musi stworzyć (nie odtworzyć) dzieło na nowo we własnym języku.

Speaker-Independent Speech Enhancement with Brain Signals

Single-channel speech enhancement algorithms have seen great improvements over the past few years. Despite these improvements, they still lack the efficiency of the auditory system in extracting attended auditory information in the presence of competing speakers. Recently, it has been shown that the attended auditory information can be decoded from the brain activity of the listener. In this paper, we propose two novel deep learning methods referred to as the Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (BESD) and the U-shaped Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (U-BESD) respectively, that take advantage of this fact to denoise a multi-talker speech mixture. We use a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) between the brain activity and the sound mixture, to better extract the features of the attended speaker to perform speech enhancement. We show, using electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded from the listener, that U-BESD outperforms a current autoencoder approach in enhancing a speech mixture as well as a speech separation approach that uses brain activity. Moreover, we show that both BESD and U-BESD successfully extract the attended speaker without any prior information about this speaker. This makes both algorithms great candidates for realistic applications where no prior information about the attended speaker is available, such as hearing aids, cellphones, or noise cancelling headphones. All procedures were performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and were approved by the Ethics Committees of the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, and the Health Sciences Faculty at Trinity College Dublin.

Speaker-Independent Speech Enhancement with Brain Signals

Single-channel speech enhancement algorithms have seen great improvements over the past few years. Despite these improvements, they still lack the efficiency of the auditory system in extracting attended auditory information in the presence of competing speakers. Recently, it has been shown that the attended auditory information can be decoded from the brain activity of the listener. In this paper, we propose two novel deep learning methods referred to as the Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (BESD) and the U-shaped Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (U-BESD) respectively, that take advantage of this fact to denoise a multi-talker speech mixture. We use a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) between the brain activity and the sound mixture, to better extract the features of the attended speaker to perform speech enhancement. We show, using electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded from the listener, that U-BESD outperforms a current autoencoder approach in enhancing a speech mixture as well as a speech separation approach that uses brain activity. Moreover, we show that both BESD and U-BESD successfully extract the attended speaker without any prior information about this speaker. This makes both algorithms great candidates for realistic applications where no prior information about the attended speaker is available, such as hearing aids, cellphones, or noise cancelling headphones. All procedures were performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and were approved by the Ethics Committees of the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, and the Health Sciences Faculty at Trinity College Dublin.