TRINITY COLLEGE Dublin and the Moscow government have begun talks that could lead to the college opening a campus in the Russian capital. Discussions have also started on the establishment of a Science Gallery in Moscow similar to the college’s successful project in Dublin.
Provost of Trinity Patrick Prendergast told The Irish Times the idea of an Irish university in Russia, concentrating on business, law and the humanities, was an attractive one.
A team from from Dublin, led by Mr Prendergast, has had meetings with the Moscow authorities in the past week on both projects and talks will continue in the future.
Trinity is also exploring the possibility of becoming involved in research and development projects at the Skolkovo Foundation, a high-tech innovation centre near Moscow where the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has already signed an agreement to establish an institute of science and technology.
Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum, on Staraya Square opposite the old headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is the proposed site of the Science Gallery. It is one of the last relics of the old Soviet museums in the city and is dilapidated.
If the talks are successful, the Science Gallery in Moscow would become one of a network of such institutions set up by Trinity in international locations including London and Singapore.
Trinity College is the only Irish university with a Russian department and Mr Prendergast praised it saying the links it had established over many years had led not only to contacts in the cultural sphere but the groundwork being laid for valuable commercial and business co-operation between the two countries.
Trinity was “playing for Ireland in Russia”, he said.
A delegation from the college has returned from Moscow after wide-ranging cultural and commercial discussions. Led by Mr Prendergast, the group included Prof Sarah Smyth, who was awarded the Medal of Pushkin by the Russian government for her contribution to Russian-language studies; Dr John Murray of Trinity’s department of Russian and Slavonic studies; Dr Roy Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford; the poet and fellow of Trinity College Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; and Zhanna O’Clery of the Trinity Foundation, who organised the visit.
The visit included a seminar on WB Yeats at the Moscow University of the Humanities, with contributions from Yeats’s biographer Dr Foster and the Russian poet and translator Prof Grigory Kruzhkov.
The first issue of a new Russian- and English-language magazine on Irish literature, Irlandskaya Literatura,in which the English-language section was edited by Dr Murray, was launched at a reception held in the Irish Embassy in Moscow, hosted by Ambassador Philip McDonagh.