Dr. Rachel Moss

Assistant Professor

Research interests

I am an art and architectural historian with a particular interest in medieval Irish art and architecture. My research has developed from doctoral studies in Romanesque architecture and sculpture to focus on the later medieval period, and in particular the social context of medieval art an architecture. I also have an interest in the ‘afterlives’ of medieval buildings - how the architecture of the Middle Ages came to be perceived and managed after the mid-sixteenth century. At a more general level, I am the editor and main author of Medieval Art and Architecture c.400–1600AD (external), the first volume of a major reference text on Irish Art and Architecture, to be published by the Royal Irish Academy and Yale University Press in October 2014.

Selected publications

• R. Moss, ‘ “Planters of great civilitie”: female patrons of the arts in late medieval Ireland’ in, T. Martin (ed.), Reassessing the Roles of Women as “Makers” of Medieval Art and Architecture (Leiden, 2012), pp. 275 – 308
• R. Moss, ‘Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle: Irish Monastic Architecture c. 1540–1640’ in R. Stalley (ed.), Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention (Bray, 2012), pp. 115-160
• R. Moss, ‘Reconstructing Cashel’ in R. Stalley (ed.), Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention (Bray, 2012) pp. 99-115
• R. Moss, ‘Piety and Politics: Funerary Sculpture in Cashel c. 1500-1640’ in R. Stalley (ed.), Medieval Art and Architecture in Limerick and south-west Ireland, British Archaeological Association Conference transactions for 2008 (Leeds, 2011), pp.158 – 175
• R. Moss, ‘Continuity and change: the material setting of public worship in the sixteenth-century’ in T. Herron and M. Potterton (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, 1494-1660 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 182 – 206
• R. Moss, Romanesque chevron ornament: the language of British, Norman and Irish Sculpture in the twelfth century, BAR International Series 1908 (Oxford, 2009)
• R. Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Dublin, 2007), pp342
• R. Moss, C. Ó Clabaigh and S. Ryan (ed), Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp234.

Teaching

All of my teaching covers medieval art and architecture. My course option for 2013-14 deals with European art and architecture c. 600-c. 900, and my senior sophister class on the art and architecture of late medieval Ireland relates more directly to my current research interests. Past and present post-graduate students have worked on topics including ‘Archaic’ Architectural Sculpture in 11th-13th Century Tuscany, late medieval Irish window tracery and Passion symbolism in Irish art.  I welcome discussion with suitably qualified prospective students with relevant research interests.

Dr. Moss on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Department of the History of Art and Architecture,,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.

Telephone:
Fax: 00 353 1 8961438
Email: rmoss@tcd.ie