Trinity University Offers New Experience Abroad in Northern Ireland

Trinity University is proud to announce a new international experience for students starting in Spring 2026: The Trinity Semester at Queen’s.

Leading the way is English Professor Jenny Browne, MFA, a two-time US-UK Fulbright recipient who has been teaching, conducting research, publishing poetry, and building ties as an honorary professor at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast for the past five years. Browne, in partnership with Trinity President Vanessa B. Beasley, Ph.D., and other University leaders, completed a deal this spring that will establish a semester-long exchange program for Tigers at Queen’s, starting this spring.

“The Trinity Semester at Queen’s is particularly unique because it's designed for liberal arts students to have an opportunity to spend a full semester in a culturally rich, historically fascinating and lively, affordable European city and also have access to the natural wonder of Ireland,” Browne says. “Belfast is an iconic, urban city that also has access to coastlines, caves, and beaches, and I think that makes it an ideal place to live and learn and study.”

“At Trinity, we believe that education should extend beyond the classroom and across borders,” President Beasley says. “The Trinity Semester at Queen’s reflects our deep commitment to preparing students for lives of meaning and global citizenship. We are especially proud to build on Professor Browne’s extraordinary academic and artistic partnerships to offer students an immersive opportunity that connects liberal arts learning with real-world cultural exchange.”

Students will study alongside counterparts at Queen’s and immerse themselves in the language, culture, and history of Northern Ireland, which Browne notes shares exciting parallels with (and distinctions from) San Antonio.

“Belfast is a borderland. And so is, I feel, San Antonio, which is to say a community that also feels very ‘in-between’ cultures,” Browne says. “This is going to be a really unique comparative experience for students to come to a place that is between the UK and Ireland. That's quite a special opportunity.”

This program, Browne notes, will be a “fully Trinity” initiative, run and led by Trinity faculty in the same vein as the Semester in Madrid, and open to any Trinity student. During the semester-long experience, Browne will head a course called “Writing in Place.”

Trinity has a long track record of popular, life-changing international experiences, and the semester at Queen’s will be a welcome, unique addition for the arts and humanities.

“We don't have a lot of study abroad programs that have things like music and drama and creative arts and sound design,” Browne says. “So, for humanities students to not only get to complete their coursework but also get to ask questions like, ‘What are the roles of the arts and humanities in larger cultural conversations,’ that is going to be special.”

Asking questions, and questioning answers, will be a central part of the semester, as students will consider the concept of borders and divides. As such, the semester will include a retreat at a peace and reconciliation center, Corrymeela Community, on the coast of Northern Ireland. Corrymeela aims to explore differences and to discover ways for people of different backgrounds to live well together.

“The core of building this new program is the idea of it really being an exchange,” Browne notes. “I believe that all learning is at its core a conversation, with tradition and history as well as with innovation and imagination, and that to enlarge this conversation to other classrooms, landscapes, and encounters with people and places beyond our familiar ones can only enlarge us as people and globally engaged citizens.”

For any Trinity student looking for a change of perspective, Browne says this semester-long experience will be an unparalleled opportunity for growth.

“When you encounter someone whose experience is different from yours, you get a sense that your world is not the world. And we often have to go somewhere to do that,” she says. “This is an opportunity to put yourself in positions that are unfamiliar, that are confusing, but are also exhilarating and enriching. That builds resourcefulness. It builds resilience. And, I think it builds an appetite for discovery. Those are qualities that will serve our students, not just at Trinity but also beyond, as they become lifelong learners and globally engaged citizens.”