The Write Exchange

As a salty sea breeze whips across dark rocky crags, a cohort of Trinity University students traverses lush rolling hills, notebooks and pens in hand, pondering how they’ll infuse the sensations that arise from this breathtaking landscape into their next assignment. 

This is “Writing in Place,” a two-week-long course English Professor Jenny Browne, MFA, has taught for the past two summers as part of the Trinity in Ireland Beyond the Classroom study abroad program. In Spring 2026, Browne will expand “Writing in Place” into a full-semester course for the inaugural Trinity Semester at Queen’s. 

“In this course, students will develop a more meaningful connection to the places from which the texts they are reading emerged, deepening their critical engagement and sparking opportunities for creative writing in response to their experience,” Browne says. “I’m incredibly excited to teach the course over an entire semester in Northern Ireland, where we’ll live and explore the landscapes we read about in poems, novels, and plays.”

Browne, a two-time U.S.-U.K. Fulbright recipient, 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. In Spring 2025, Browne, in partnership with Trinity President Vanessa B. Beasley, Ph.D., and other University leaders, established a semester-long exchange program with Queen’s called the Trinity Semester at Queen’s. Browne will spend her entire spring semester in Northern Ireland teaching Queen’s and Trinity students in “Writing in Place” and co-teaching with a Queen’s professor a culture course titled “Exploring Northern Ireland,” which introduces students to various events and activities across the island.

This October, faculty and staff from Queen’s Seamus Heaney Centre visited Trinity’s campus for the Lennox Seminar Series. Novelist and screenwriter Glenn Patterson, poet Leontia Flynn, poet and short story writer Dawn Watson, and artist Rachel Brown enriched the Trinity community with their artistic insights, marking a promising start to this new partnership between Trinity and Queen’s.