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Department of History of Art and Architecture

Anna Sweeney

Dr Anna McSweeney

Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture

Research Interests

My research focuses on the art and architecture of the Islamic world, in particular Spain/Al Andalus, north Africa and the medieval Mediterranean. My recent monograph examines the long history of the Alhambra palace in Granada, with a focus on its historic wooden ceilings. I have published on medieval material culture including ivories, plaster and wood. I am interested in Islamic ceramics, manuscripts and architectural interiors, histories of objects, art and architecture of the medieval Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa.

My forthcoming book focuses on craft practices in medieval Al Andalus. I have a particular interest in Islamic woodwork - I am a founding member of the Islamic Wood Networks research group and I was co-coordinator of the Crafting Medieval Spain project: Co-Investigator on the BA/Leverhulme funded project Crafting Medieval Spain with Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Teaching

I contribute to a wide range of modules at Freshman level and offer the Junior Sophister option Islamic Art and Architecture and the Senior Sophister option The Arts of Islamic Spain and North Africa. I was Director of the MPhil programme in History of Art and Architecture from 2021-2026. I offer the MPhil option The Arts of the Book, which examines Islamic manuscripts from the Chester Beatty and Trinity Library collection. 

I welcome PhD proposals and applications within the following areas of research:

  • Islamic art and architecture
  • The art and architecture of Al Andalus and Iberian Peninsula
  • Museum and Heritage with a focus on global art history
  • Object Histories and Biographies
  • History of Collecting and Curating
  • Islamic manuscripts, particularly relating to material in the Chester Beatty and Trinity library collections

Conferences

Islamic Art in Ireland: Teaching, Curating, Researching.
International public symposium at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Neill Lecture Theatre, 9th June 2025.

Seeing Isfahan: Perspectives on the Safavid Image.
International Conference with Dr Moya Carey, Chester Beatty, Dublin at the Trinity Long Room Hub. 27-28th May 2022.

Selected Publications

  • 'An Early Muqarnas Plaster Ceiling in the Alhambra Palace, Granada' (pp. 422–440) Stucco in the Islamic World: Studies of Architectural Ornament from Spain to India (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
  • 'The decorative wooden ceilings of Nasrid Granada and the Alhambra' Postmedieval 15, 1127–1156 (2024).
  • McSweeney, A., Rosser-Owen, M. Editors’ introduction: Crafting medieval Spain. Postmedieval 15, 1059–1076 (2024).
  • Anna McSweeney and Mariam Rosser-Owen, 'Four wooden ceilings from the Torrijos Palace, Toledo' The Burlington Magazine 165, (1449), 1272–1289 (2023)
  • 'Rethinking the Borders of Islamic Art: Paterna Ceramics from the Fourteenth Century to Today’ in David Govantes-Edwards and Chloë Duckworth (eds). Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe (Equinox 2022), 67-81.
  • From Granada to Berlin: the Alhambra Cupola (Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2020)
  • Anna McSweeney and Claudia Heide (eds.), Art in Translation, Orientalism and Spain, special issue, vol. 9:1, 2017.
  • 'Portable Monuments. Lottinoplastique and the Transmission of Images'. Published in German in Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburgs Vermächtnis und die Zukunft der Ikonologie. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, pp. 41-53 (2018).
  • 'Mudéjar and the Alhambresque: Spanish Pavilions at the Universal Expositions and the Invention of a National Style', Art in Translation. Spain and Orientalism 9:1 (2017).
  • 'Versions and Visions of the Alhambra in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman World', West 86th: a Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 22:1, Spring/Summer 2015, 44-69.

Museums and Exhibitions

I collaborate in teaching and research with museums including the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Chester Beatty, Dublin. From 2015-2018 I was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in London with the Bilderfahrzeuge Project, where I co-curated an exhibition at the Lethaby Gallery, London on Metadata: How we Relate to Images (2018), supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education. From 2013-14 I worked at the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin as the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Kunsthistorische Institut, Florence. My research on the Alhambra at the Museum in Berlin was filmed for the Arte documentary High-Tech Archaeology (June 2017). 

Dr McSweeney on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Department of History of Art and Architecture
School of Histories and Humanities
Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
Dublin D02 PN40
Email: anna.mcsweeney@tcd.ie