UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy

Dr Lynda Mulvin has a specialist background and interest in classical antiquity and architectural history. Her expertise in these areas informs her core undergraduate courses on classical and medieval art and architecture as well as her thematic M.A courses. She is the Director of the MA in Art History and her present Masters module course is Istanbul: Palimpsest city. She also leads the field trip to Istanbul to examine the art and architecture of the city.

Dr Mulvin's BA undergraduate degree was a two subject moderatorship in the History of Art and Classics from Trinity College, Dublin (1987). Dr Mulvin is a also post-graduate of the Katholiëke Universitat Leuven, Belgium  (1990) where she was awarded la plus grande distinction for her M.Arch Sc. in Conservation. She returned to the School of Classics to complete a Phd (1999), on the architecture of the late Roman villa in the Danube-Balkan region, which was published in 2002 as a research monograph. She continues to participate in archaeological work and excavations, for example recently she acts as Roman expert on the UCD School of Classics survey of the Livatho valley in Kephalonia, Greece, and as an expert contributor to the assessment of Romano-Hibernian material in ongoing investigations and excavations in Ireland including Knowth. A revised study of the Knowth material in which she  has a written chapter was published by the Royal Irish Academy in June 2012.

Dr Mulvin completed a catalogue of the collection of Roman & Byzantine Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland which culminated in a permanent NMI exhibition on the subject of Roman life and the monograph, Roman and Byzantine Antiquities in the National Museum of Ireland - A Select Catalogue (2006). In addition, as a result of a President's Research Award (2005) she is working towards a series of articles on certain important unpublished drawings of the neoclassical British architect, C.R. Cockerell, that were made by him on his grand tour of Ionian Antiquities between 1810 and 1817. Arising out of this research she convened the successful international conference (May 2009) titled  'The Fusion of Neoclassical Principles: scholars, artists, architects, builders and designers in the neoclassical period' for which she was awarded a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre studies for the study of British art and the UCD research Strand on Material Culture which was published in December 2011 as a volume of essays, book title Fusion of Neo-classical Principles (Wordwell, Dublin, 2011).

Dr Mulvin recently organised a symposium entitled 'Orientalism and Anglo-Irish scholarship 1740-1810 in the Gennadius Library, Athens. The fruits of this symposium were written as a series of essays which have just been published as a New Griffon series of the Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies Athens in July 2012 book title 'Culture of Translation: British and Irish Scholarship in the Gennadius Library Athens 1740-1840. She was recently made a Member of the Board of the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies at Athens.

She is an active member of ICOMOS and IPCRA and works to solve practical conservation problems relating to stone decay on eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings in Dublin. 

Dr Mulvin's other current research is the development of a joint research project on the Franciscans in Connaught, together with Gosia D'Aughton UCC  and Edel Bhreathnach of the Michael O' Cleirigh Institute, UCD. It is intended that this research, to include an appraisal of the historical significance of Franciscan architecture and material culture in this region, will be published in due course.