Mitchell Scholar Blogs

         The trip to Dun Laoghaire to get to the National Rehabilitation Hospital isn’t exactly that long per se – a little over an hour and twenty give or take, which isn’t awful – it’s more the various methods of transport that it takes to do so. I start on the dart and look out the window like I’m pretending I’m in a music video, my eyes skipping the along with the twinkles of light reflecting off the surface of the blue coastal water. Next up is jockeying for a seat on the 46A which rolls through the sleepy suburb. After a few stops I’m on my feet and walking along quiet roads and empty soccer fields before I arrive at my final destination.  

         Arriving at the hospital almost always feels somewhat epic due to the display of mountains that serves as its background – well, mountains in Ireland, so maybe more hills, but you get the picture. It’s a bit of a breathtaking sight, and I always find myself a little in awe of the rolling green expanse that stretches before me upon entering. These shifts working as a speech language therapist with children recovering from brain injuries and strokes have become the highlight of my week – after training with the staff, I now get to sit and help guide young people as we work towards our shared goal of their recovery. This is a process I myself am all too familiar with; I remember recovering from my own brain injury and the slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding steps it takes to regain what natural instincts that had since been lost. Helping the kids has served as a reminder of one of the reasons why I’m in Ireland to begin with. As I will be attending medical school next year and training to become a physician, I wanted to see more of what healthcare looked like around the world in order to offer the most culturally sensitive and nuanced care.

         But all such lofty goals are not on the top of my mind when I’m working with one of my favorite patients, an eight-year-old Sarah (and yes, the name has been anonymized so that we’re HIPAA compliant). Although Sarah cannot speak, she communicates using a machine that tracks her eye movements – we play games together, watch Moana (NEVER Frozen), and work to increase her ability to communicate. But sometimes the spasms set in, and we sit there holding each other’s hands until they pass. Coming here, to Ireland, has been so meaningful in so many ways, but especially in that it reminded me why I’ve embarked on the path I have – namely, the human moments of kindness and kinship I’ve had and how they’re influenced my decision to go into medicine. When I sit with Sarah and we work as a team, it’s not about any preconceived goal. Rather, it’s about offering my support, in the best way I can, to someone who needs it.

And Ireland has returned that to me in spades. I remember the first day I got to Trinity and was clearly unable to move all three of my gigantic bags, a stranger offered to help me find my room and with my luggage. After silencing my New York sensibilities that someone was trying to rob me, I was part of a total stranger’s act of kindness so unexpected but one that I felt has been repeated time and time again here: the bartender at my friend’s favorite pub, who knows I don’t like Guinness but doesn’t judge me for it and gifts me an extra G&T from time to time; in my friends from my Masters course staying up with me all night to finish a last minute assignment; in the stranger at the Camden who ran after me and my group after forgetting our photos at the photobooth. They’re small examples, sure, but they’ve been indicative of the small moments of connection that have helped me remember the person I want to be and the career I hope to pursue. For what is medicine, and life for that matter, if not a collection of well-told and hard-fought stories?

The past two months I have traveled to 5 countries and most recently uncovered a new continent – Africa. Visiting Morocco and doing a Sahara tour was on my bucket list for awhile, a trip that felt right in my heart. After 10 days of traveling around Morocco, Dublin’s streets felt so calm and safe, like a welcoming home inviting you to get back to work. Morocco enveloped me in its cultural presence, architecture, history, local art, the golden sands of Merzouga desert and bright milky way in the night sky in the middle of Sahara.

On one of our tours we visited Aït Benhaddou, a town in the middle of Morocco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, where famous Gladiator and Game of Thrones were filmed. Studying Documentary Practice at DCU, and knowing how many powerful films were made in Morocco and Africa in general, it was magical seeing these sights in person. We rode camels and did sand boarding, made our own perfume from organic oils and scents in Marrakesh, visited 6 different museums, including once the largest Islamic school in North Africa, Medersa Ben Youssef, built in 14th century.

Apart from Morocco, I went to Dubrovnik, Croatia; Lisbon, Portugal; Vienna, Austria; Oxford, England for a documentary shoot. Living in Dublin means taking advantage of Ryanair flights and discovering new cultures every other weekend. I have also been hosting many of my friends from United States and Europe, creating a web of cultural exchange.

Dublin became a place of love and growth for me. Now I have my secret spots by the ocean on Killiney Hill where I go to read and have picnics by myself, reflecting on life. I am an Ambassador at DCU, creating videos for our university’s marketing team, I work as a personal assistant to a US film director that I met at NBC during Paris Olympics, and am currently applying to new opportunities for next year. No time to waste, and this year became officially one of my most cultural and fulfilling years of my life.

And by the way – New Year I celebrated with my new Russian friends in Dublin, all immigrants and students in different fields, meeting in Ireland in our adventure called life.

Dublin is small. That’s something that’s easy to forget when you are weaving through massive crowds on Grafton Street at 3PM on a Saturday. But its something that I’m reminded of every time I’m given the opportunity to meet with someone working in technology policy along Dublin’s Silicon Docks.

Since arriving in Dublin, I’ve been fortunate to meet with people working in industry, government, and civil society to promote technologies which protect user rights and encourage a positive online experience. But my meetings with these people haven’t just been informative, they’ve been transformative.

Every time I meet with someone working in this field, I feel grateful that they are willing to spare some of their free time to share their insights with me, a random American student they’ve never met. But beyond simply sharing their experiences with me, these individuals have gone out of their way to invest in my growth. They’ve connected me with other people working in the field and invited me to events to learn more about emerging challenges in the digital policy space.

Most importantly, they’ve treated me as their equal–which I am not, by any means. As I’ve met people working for Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, Digital Rights Ireland, or Reddit, I’ve found that the people I engage with are always interested in my perspective and insights as an American living in Dublin, despite the fact that I have significantly less experience than them. I greatly appreciate their genuine interest in my opinion, as this has given me confidence in my own ability to scrutinize technology policy and believe that it will make me a better lawyer in the future.

These individuals have also reaffirmed that I am pursuing the right career for me. Working for Digital Rights Ireland as a legal researcher, I feel immensely fortunate that my supervisors have shared their insights on the EU’s technology policy strategy with me. Learning from lawyers and researchers at University College Dublin, I’ve become fascinated by minute details in landmark legislation and company policy. (An encouraging development given that I hope to become a lawyer).

Some other highlights from my time in Dublin include: attending an event on AI in education at Google headquarters; visiting Microsoft headquarters with my MSc in Digital Policy cohort and learning about content moderation at LinkedIn; attending a conference put on by the Data Protection Commission for data protection officers; and attending an event on AI at the German embassy in Dublin.

At home over the holidays last month, relatives and friends bombarded me with questions about my time so far in Ireland: the standard chorus of “What is it like?” and “Is it as rainy as they say?” (yes) and “So when can I come visit?” that I’m sure anyone who has studied abroad has experienced. While responding to these repeated questions can get a bit tiresome, having to debrief my experience time and again has given me the opportunity to reflect on the past 3 months while looking ahead at what’s to come in 2025.

What I was overwhelmingly struck by is my growing realization as I progress in the Masters of how appropriate of a location Dublin is for the study of energy systems and sustainable urban planning. While I chose to study in Ireland because I was attracted to the unique interdisciplinary program Trinity offered, and was intrigued by the more manageable size of the Irish national transmission system compared to the sprawling and disjointed network in the US, my studies and my own lived experience in Dublin has shown me that there is a whole ecosystem of factors at play that make Dublin so uniquely situated to be an incubation hub for sustainable urbanist initiatives.

First, the city has always had a culture of walking, apparent in the ambulatory structure of classics like Ulysses or the foci of Dublin history books like the recent A City Runs Through Them by Fergal Tobin. Yet this culture has not always been prioritized in policy or the built environment: as Dublin’s economy developed and the city experienced its first expansions in the 1990s to early 2000s, semi-private suburban developments were built and car-oriented transit routes were prioritized, choking out biking routes and forms of public transportation from being built. It has only been recently that the city has launched initiatives to encourage other modes of transportation, such as the Covid-era effort to create now-ubiquitous bike lanes. What I’ve learned while being in Dublin is that this culture of walking, while not always present in policy, has always existed—and that resultingly, as soon as even a small investment in pedestrian infrastructure is made, it will be well-used and well-loved. This has made Dublin city administrators enthusiastic about investing into the community, infrastructure, and culture of their city.

Secondly, Dublin, as the EU hub for technology and finance, is situated uniquely to work with and shoulder the responsibility of meeting the needs of these growing industries. This double-edged sword means that there are ample opportunities for public-private partnerships, such as a project building 5G towers in the Docklands; on the flipside, however, the Irish electric system faces a critical challenge: to meet the needs of the finance and technology sectors, and in particular the needs of the exploding data center industry, it’s predicted that in Dublin, data centers will go from comprising <5% of electric load today to almost a third of electric load in less than a decade. If these loads are unable to be met, Irish customers may face frequent blackouts, but these sectors, as significant contributors to the Irish economy, cannot be abandoned. As such, Dublin will be the center of enormous urban and energy-systems change in the next decade. Government actors, utilities, and researchers all know this—there is a sense of urgency in the research taking place here, and an enthusiasm that transcends bureaucratic or political bottlenecks, that I do not sense in the US. Dublin as a city has its work cut out for it, yet there is an enthusiasm to meet this challenge that makes me excited to learn from this process and see what the Dublin of 10 years from now looks like.  

On a Tuesday in October last year, I sat with Father Mike Cussen in his Toyota. We were in a parking lot near my school, the University of Limerick. Cussen, a silver-haired man in his 60s, wore a gray quarter-zip sweater and had brought with him books and folders stuffed with papers describing the history of the church in Ireland.

I was meeting with Cussen to record an interview with him about the dwindling number of priests in Ireland. In the 1970s, when Cussen first attended seminary, more than 30 other people were also preparing to become priests for Limerick County’s diocese, where Cussen now serves.

“Now, there’s nobody, except one person,” Cussen told me, as I clutched my recorder.  

Drawing on this interview and others, I eventually created a podcast episode for my Intro to Broadcast class about the changing role of the Catholic church in Ireland. In particular, I highlighted a program in Limerick county that trains lay people to take on ministry roles traditionally performed by the clergy. This was one of many instances last fall in which I was able to get to know Limerick and Ireland through my journalism.

The fall semester for my masters of journalism course encompassed both audio reporting and news writing; in the spring, we’ll be focusing on narrative writing, visual storytelling and other skills. Besides writing about the church in Ireland, I also wrote local news stories for the Limerick Voice, UL’s student-run newspaper, and I submitted freelance stories to a couple U.S.-based publications, including a profile of an Irish actress for The New York Times and stories about religion in Ireland for Christianity Today.

Being able to report from Limerick has helped fulfill a lifelong dream of mine to be a foreign correspondent. I’ve had this dream ever since my parents moved our family to Tianjin, China, where I grew up for 17 years. There, learning about foreign affairs was as simple as a stroll through the local market or a lively conversation with a taxi driver. During taxi rides, I would chat with drivers about their views on Obama and Xi Jinping, or hear older women griping about the rising cost of living while shopping at the open air market. Every summer, I returned to the U.S. with my family, where I told stories of life in China to friends and cousins, attempting to translate my world abroad into terms they would understand. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already, in some small way, acting as a foreign correspondent — engaging in the fundamental journalistic endeavor of mediating between the world of one’s readers and the world one sees through reporting.

After college, my interest in foreign affairs journalism is a part of what led me to apply for the Mitchell. Reporting on Limerick has brought me in touch with Father Cussen and with a host of other characters, and it has helped me understand the community in new ways. My reporting from Ireland also helped me win an award from the Overseas Press Club, which will provide me with funding to further continue reporting from overseas even after my Mitchell year has ended. I’m excited to tell more stories about Limerick and Ireland this spring!  

Five years ago, my colleagues and I stood outside, excitedly holding a handmade banner that read: TO SAFEHOUSE WITH LOVE, BOSTON.

What had brought us together was the anticipated opening of America’s first overdose prevention center (OPC). Safehouse was set to launch in Philadelphia in February 2020, following years of legal battles. Its debut signaled a promising new era—one that valued the lives of people who use drugs and embraced evidence-based harm reduction strategies to combat the overdose crisis. But the celebration was short-lived. As community resistance intensified and the building owner withdrew the lease, Safehouse was forced to retreat. To this day, it remains unopened.

It was my dream to work at the first overdose prevention center in the United States. When Safehouse’s plans fell through, the question of which state would claim that milestone was unclear. (It ended up being NY in 2021). Who could have imagined that five years later I would find myself working at Ireland’s first OPC, known here as a Medically Supervised Injecting Facility (MSIF)?

Even before I submitted my Mitchell Scholarship application, I had been manifesting the chance to work with Merchants Quay Ireland (MQI)—the organization behind Ireland’s first syringe exchange program and MSIF. As luck would have it, just hours after arriving in Dublin for the first time, I had my interview for an MSIF Project Worker role. By the end of that week, I learned I’d secured a spot on the inaugural team. From the moment I stepped into the space, it felt like home.

Three weeks ago, we officially opened our doors, and it has been a whirlwind ever since. We’ve had over 100 clients, all of whom are kind, funny, creative and endlessly grateful. I share this gratitude. The space itself is remarkable. The booths are huge (I’ve volunteered at the MSIF in Mexico, and three of their booths could fit into one of ours!), we have a fancy vein finder, and compassionate staff who not only provide syringes and walk clients through the injection process but also make a great cup of tea.

It’s just the beginning, but the opportunity to be part of this has been an incredible complement to the Addiction Recovery course I’m taking at Trinity. Trinity, much like MQI, has made me feel at home. Every day, my classmates bring snacks and sweets to share with one another. Just today, I was offered tangerines, biscuits, chocolates, and rice cakes. I will certainly miss this when I return to academia in America. 

I’m also constantly in awe of the expertise and passion my classmates bring. Each of them is actively working in the field of addiction and their drive (both mental and physical) is inspiring. One classmate, for example, commutes from Belfast and stays in a hostel on class days just to participate in the program. Let me emphasize that. She commutes from another country to attend class. That shut me up about my 1-hour Luas commute really quick. She also frequently speaks and writes in Irish with all of us, which I love. Today, I was thrilled to correctly recognize when she asked my friend to pass her the milk (bainne)! It seems my Duolingo lessons are finally paying off.

Sometimes, on my way to work or heading to class, it’s easy to forget I’m in Ireland. My noise-canceling headphones and frequent daydreaming often take me elsewhere. But then I’ll look up and spot an Irish flag in the distance or take off my headphones and hear the unmistakable lilt of an Irish accent. In those moments, I’m reminded of just how magical it is that I ended up here.

I knew I wanted to study in Ireland when I learned of Frederick Douglass’s visit here in 1845–46. A student of Civil War–era U.S. history, I had read about events like the New York City draft riots of 1863, a series of violent anti-Black attacks led by working-class Irish Americans bridling at the possibility of conscription into the Union army. So it surprised me to discover that one of the foremost Black American abolitionists would have made a point to visit Ireland, which I naively assumed to be a hotbed of proslavery sentiment (as were certain parts of England that thrived on slave-grown cotton). Douglass’s Irish tour—as well as Daniel O’Connell’s refusal to accept donations from slaveholders in support of his Repeal campaign—were my first clues that there existed a deep tension within the Irish diaspora over the issue of slavery. Since coming to Belfast, I’ve had the chance to learn a great deal more about Douglass’s time in this city (and even to write a paper about it!), so I thought I would share a few interesting findings.

Douglass was in Ireland to sell copies of his recently published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. When the young abolitionist began lecturing in New York and Massachusetts shortly after escaping his bondage in Maryland in 1838, audiences found his oratory so eloquent that they refused to believe he had been enslaved. In his Narrative, Douglass attempted to prove his credibility by providing details of his enslavement, including the names of his enslavers, the Aulds. As Douglass was still a fugitive, this amount of identifying information exposed him to huge risk, and so he fled to the British Isles for a nearly two-year tour to raise money and avoid recapture. In Belfast, he publicly referred to himself as a “mere fugitive slave, liable to be hunted down” by the “bloodhounds of the white man.”

The experience of touring abroad was personally transformative. According to historian David Blight, Douglass was steeped in the “political liberalism” and “laissez-faire individualism” of progressive nineteenth-century elite circles. Douglass argued to audiences in Belfast that slavery was wrong not only because it was cruel and exploitative, but also because it stripped enslaved people of the ability to work for themselves, which he thought a necessary component of the self-fashioning of all liberal subjects. In Ireland, the orator was able to free himself both of the looming threat of re-enslavement and of the at-times peremptory presence of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, who guided his affairs in the United States. Enjoying newfound autonomy and celebrity, feted by leading Belfast men, and earning money hand over fist from the sale of his Narrative—his very own intellectual property—Douglass grew in confidence as a speaker and strategist. Soon after returning to the States, he would begin to distance himself from Garrison. 

Douglass provoked controversy in Belfast over his stance toward the Free Church of Scotland. In 1843, a group of Evangelicals led by Thomas Chalmers broke from the Church of Scotland to form their own entity independent of the state, the Free Church, or Free Kirk. To fund their new congregation, the Free Churchers solicited donations from American slaveholding Presbyterians. This incensed but also intrigued Douglass, who, upon arriving in Belfast in December 1845, wrote that the city was “the very hot bed of presbyterianism and free churchism, a blow can be struck here, more effuctually [sic] than in any other part of Ireland.” Borrowing a tactic from O’Connell (whom he had met earlier during his sojourn on the island), he demanded in his lectures that the “unanimous cry of the people of Belfast, to the Free Church of Scotland . . . would be, ‘Have no communion with the American slaveholders;’ and that the next thing the Free Church should do would be to send back the blood-stained money which they had received.” Interestingly, Douglass was careful not to espouse Repeal, promising not to “speak of O’Connell in connexion with any other subject than” anti-slavery. Yet his attack on the Free Church and his implicit association with “The Liberator” was enough to alienate a segment of the city’s Presbyterian elite, many of whom favored continued union with Britain. The result was a string of invective newspaper editorials that echoed many of the critiques Douglass faced in the States, accusing him of being an “impostor” who lacked “integrity” and perhaps had never really been enslaved.

Ever the political strategist, as he prepared to cross the Irish Sea for a tour of Scotland and England in early 1846, Douglass would nonetheless include a written testimonial from a sympathetic Belfast Protestant minister in an updated edition of the Narrative. This addition angered Douglass’s Dublin-based printer, Richard Webb, a friend of Garrison who privately described Douglass as an ill-mannered “savage” and “wild animal,” apparently offended by the orator’s growing self-confidence. (One cannot help but note Webb’s use of the long-standing racist trope of the uncivilized African brute.)

Douglass was deeply impacted by witnessing Irish poverty and the beginning of the Famine. At the outset of his lecture tour, Douglass consistently chided Irish listeners for likening their relationship to Britain to that between enslaved people and their masters, arguing that such a comparison “did not sufficiently distinguish between certain forms of oppression and slavery.” Yet by the end of his tour, he would recall in a letter to Garrison the “human misery, ignorance, degradation, filth and wretchedness” he had observed among the Irish poor. Particularly horrifying to Douglass was Dublin, where ““the streets were almost literally alive with beggars.” Reflecting on this penury, he softened his stance on the question of “Irish slaves” somewhat, concluding that the Irish were

in much the same degradation as the American slaves. I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. He who really and truly feels for the American slave, cannot steel his heart to the woes of others; and he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his anti-slavery faith.

This is just a small sample of everything I’ve learned so far! As I begin my dissertation research, I’m looking forward to uncovering much more about the transatlantic connections between Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Some books and articles I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Douglass’s Irish tour:

• Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
• Chaffin, Tom. Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
• Fenton, Laurence. Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell.’ Collins Press, 2014.
• Ferreira, Patricia. “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine.” American Studies International 37, no. 2 (1999): 69–83.
• Jenkins, Lee. “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork.” Irish Review, no. 24 (1999): 80–95.
• Kinealy, Christine. Black Abolitionists in Ireland. Routledge, 2020.
• Maclear, J. F. “Thomas Smyth, Frederick Douglass, and the Belfast Antislavery Campaign.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 4 (1979): 286–97.
• Murray, Hannah-Rose, and John R. McKivigan, eds. Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland, 1845–1895. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
• Quinn, John F. “‘Safe in Old Ireland’: Frederick Douglass’s Tour, 1845–1846.” The Historian 64, no. 3/4 (2002): 535–50.
• Ritchie, Daniel. “‘The Stone in the Sling’: Frederick Douglass and Belfast Abolitionism.” American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 3 (2017): 245–72.
• Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

And of course: Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

Currently living in Ulster University student accommodations on the north end of City Centre, I frequently ride the Glider Bus to visit my cousins in Poleglass or eat lunch and study at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich. Along the way, stops in City Centre are announced only in English until the bus crosses into the West, where each is then listed in English and Irish. As the bus drives down Falls Road, I see a number of commemorative murals for the Blanketmen and H Block Hunger Strikers out the windows. In these moments, I recall how these prisoners, covered in their own excrement and with only a blanket as clothing, learned and taught the Irish language as a means of struggle against British policies of criminalization. This history is reflected in the modern work of Irish language schools across the North of Ireland, many established following the prison struggles of the 1980s.


Bobby Sands Mural

My cousins who teach at an Irish language primary school inspired me to learn Irish over the past year. Being in Belfast as a Mitchell Scholar has enabled me to take weekly classes in-person at An Droichead. As I walk to class on Tuesday nights and cross past the Sandy Row neighborhood, marked by a King William mural and lined with British flags, onto the Lower Ormeau Road, a Catholic area of Belfast where the school sits, issues of nationalism, cultural hegemony, and conflict transformation abound in my mind. Although the Northern Ireland peace process centers around respect for difference and parity of esteem between Unionist and Republican communities, the language of one nationality still does not have the legal and cultural protection afforded the language of the other. This is not only present in matters of signage around City Centre and on public transportation, but also in the allocation of block grant subsidies towards Irish language schooling. Although there is a statutory duty for the UK government to support the development of Irish medium-school education, Irish language medium-schools do not receive the same funding as English language medium-schools.

Since I arrived in Belfast, it has been interesting to discuss these matters with Irish language activists and learn how the Irish language has become a force for positive community change in the North despite the lack of abundant resources. Over twenty-five years since the finalization of the peace agreement, Irish language programs offered by groups such as Glór Na Móna offer pathways for young people to peacefully play a part in the cultural restoration of Belfast and Northern Ireland as characteristically Irish. Additionally, events such as Féile an Phobail promoting the language have helped decrease the incidence of sectarian bonfires in Catholic neighborhoods during the summer months.

While there is still antagonism towards the Irish language in some unionist communities, there is a growing non-sectarian interest in the language, evidenced by the opening of an Irish language school in East Belfast and an increasing number of people in Protestant communities learning Irish. Over the next eight months, I’m excited to continue learning the language not just so I can speak fluently with my cousins in our ancestral tongue but also to understand more about how cultural activism can help build peace in divided and criminalized communities.

wince in pain,
sit up
accept the fact that I'm not sleeping
flick the little light on
find some way to pass the time


dog-ear the page of a good book,
do some writing
some more reading
kiss Joyce upon his eyelids
tuck him back in for the night


he'll dream of many things,
write some down
they'll make him famous
but he could never dream up you
you wouldn't make sense at the time:


kid in pink KD 11s
with a 20 pc McNugget
Section 8 Projects, Atlanta
age 16, 5 foot 9


in the backseat of a Charger,
'cause your brother's here for Christmas
getting hotboxed secondhand
'cause you just needed a ride


peering straight down at your phone
with your knees wedged to your chest
and that years-old sense of anger
floating right behind your eyes…


reading a Google AI overview
of some bullshit called "Ulysses"
for a class you gotta pass
to graduate on time







graduate on time,
graduate on time,
graduate on time,
just gotta graduate on time.

Before choosing Queen’s, I was really torn between Belfast or Dublin. I’d been to Dublin before. I knew I liked it. But something in my heart was pulling me in a different direction. I can’t really explain it. I had never been up north at all. I had really no reason, only a hunch, a suspicion that there was something special going on up there and a desire to be a part of it.

Turns out, I was right.

Belfast is one of those cities that sneaks up on you. Every day, I stumble across some kind of reminder that I’m in the right place. It surprises you. Just now, I walked into the Seamus Heaney Centre to write my blog, and one of the PhD students let me know that a certain singer of a certain brown eyed song would be visiting shortly. Very likely, by the time I finish writing, I’ll have waved hello.

These are the kind of surprises I’m talking about. Back in November, I was talking about my songwriting process with a friend at Write Night, when a girl I’d never met before asked if I was a musician. I told her I was, and then she invited me to a women’s music session. This might seem like a kind of natural social interaction, but if you know me, you know this is a dream come true. I’ve been making music for years and saying, “I just wish I had a group of girls to play with.” Of course I have girl friends who are musicians, but it’s rare and it’s special to live in the same place, to come together in a circle and make music together, ceremoniously, every Wednesday at 7.

My women’s music nights are a huge Belfast highlight. These girls have brought out a musical confidence I didn’t know I had and introduced me to an underground music scene that is frankly spilling over in Belfast.

A similar thing happened when I was out for a drink at Maddens one night. The bar manager, Bernie, overheard me talking about music and invited me to one of his Monday night jams. These jams have introduced me to some truly incredible musicians. I’m learning so much, and every week I leave filled up with a sense of possibility and enthusiasm.

The arts scene in Belfast reminds me of New Orleans in a way, my favorite American city. Both places have been through a lot, and I’ve found that where there is pain, there is art and there is healing. Of course there’s art in a lot of places, but it’s these places where you find the best kind of art. The kind that speaks truth to power. Just think of Kneecap.

And while we think of Kneecap, I’ll tell you about another little surprise. Last March, after winning the Mitchell Scholarship, I attended the Oscar Wilde Awards in Los Angeles. There, through the masses of people, I happened to meet Rich Peppiatt and Trevor Birney, the writer and producer of the film Kneecap. A few months later I saw the movie in theaters and internalized it as another little sign. If people are making movies like this in Belfast, then it’s the right place to me. We met up for a drink when I arrived and now, somehow, I landed a job at their film company, Coup D’état. I’m reading scripts and doing research, and I honestly couldn’t be happier or more grateful.

In 2022, after spending my first two years out of undergrad working in TV production in California, I took a big chance on authenticity.  I left to move closer to my roots: indie film, music, literature, theatre. I had no idea I would find all that in Belfast.

I’ll leave you with one more highlight. A few months ago, I joined a local poetry class. I’m not particularly ambitious when it comes to my poetry, but I think writing it is important for any artist. It keeps things experimental, cuts the fluff, and brings us back to the point.

Anyway, I show up to this class, and it’s a small class, only 4 of us, and there’s this older woman who is just so wonderful. So funny and warm and endearingly modest. Instantly, she reminded me of my Nana. Then she said her name was Pat, my Nana’s name. After class, she drove me home, and we’ve since formed a friendship.

The best thing about Belfast is its people. I feel so lucky to meet them.

              I’m not sure what it was that originally drew to me to mandolin. I had never even met another mandolin player when I bought my first mandolin. I’ve always enjoyed learning how to play a variety of instruments ranging from the typical piano to the obscure dulcimer. With all the instruments I’ve learned, mandolin has always held a special place close to my heart. When I heard I won the Mitchell Scholarship, I was excited to explore the world of Irish mandolin. I was a relative beginner, and most of my experience was with American bluegrass—so learning Irish jigs seemed like a fun and natural way to expand my repertoire and to learn about traditional Irish music. In fact, I learned the University College Cork had a traditional music society that met up weekly to play traditional Irish tunes. It felt as though the stars were aligning.

              Still a beginner mandolin player, I decided to stop by the pub where they met up to check out one of their sessions and chat with some of the members. Unfortunately, I quickly realized there was a barrier to entry—you need to actually know traditional Irish music, or at least be able to pick it up quickly. I asked one of the fiddle players after the session what some of the songs they normally play are; I was determined to go and practice as much as possible so I could show up the next week. The response, however, was not what I expected: “I’m not really sure what they’re called, one person just starts playing and we all jump in.” It was so perfectly natural for these musicians to play together in this way, many had been playing these exact songs on their instruments since they were just kids. Apart from the skill issue, I realized that there was a cultural divide that I didn’t have the experience to cross. So, for the time being at least, I went back to playing my bluegrass music and learning a couple Irish tunes one-by-one with the hope of improving enough to return on a later date.

              A question was then prompted by my precarious position. Where do I, an American temporarily in Ireland, fit into the cultural equation? I’ll be in Ireland for a year, longer than your typical vacation, but with a definite end date. I don’t want to be the culturally oblivious tourist, but I’m also not struggling with the same worries of cultural preservation as immigrants. I didn’t grow up learning Irish tunes on the concertina, but should I ditch my bluegrass music to learn some Irish jigs?  How do the traditions I bring with me fit into the traditions of my temporary home?

              I don’t have an answer for the what exactly a person should do to reconcile two different cultures. However, in my own specific experience, it seems like there is room for compromise—embracing new traditions while still making space for old ones.  Over the course of my first semester at UCC, I became more acquainted with Ireland. I made some Irish friends, learned some of the slang, and could consistently split the “G” on a pint of Guiness. As an aside, my mother wasn’t even impressed when I told her I could consistently split the “G” on a pint of Guiness—quite the opposite actually. But at the same time, in exchange for being introduced to naggins, I taught my Irish friends how to shotgun a beer—a truly cultural experience. I didn’t get a chance to celebrate thanksgiving with my family as I usually do, but I got to share a meal the following Saturday in Dublin with my fellow Mitchell scholars and our lovely Irish hosts. I even, albeit unwittingly, brought a “celebration caterpillar” and learned about the wonders of children’s birthdays in Ireland. The traditional music society hasn’t worked out yet, but in the meantime, I found a place more suited to my mandolin talents—the UCC orchestra. I may be the only mandolin player to the orchestra, but I brought what I am to where I was—and the violin section appreciates my enthusiasm. We are playing a medley of Pirates of the Caribbean tunes.