Biography

Dr Anna McSweeney is a Lecturer in Art History at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy in the University of Sussex. A specialist in the art and architecture of the western Mediterranean Islamic world, her publications include an edited volume of Art in Translation on 'Spain and Orientalism' (2017) and a monograph on the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain (forthcoming, Verlag Kettler, 2019).

From 2015-2018 she was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in London with the Bilderfahrzeuge Project, where her work included co-curating 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 she worked at the Museum of Islamic art in Berlin (M.I.K.) as the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Kunsthistorische Institut, Florence.  As part of a new collaboration that she instigated between the Museum in Berlin and the Patronato de la Alhambra in Granada, her research was filmed for the Arte documentary High-Tech Archaeology (June 2017). She has an undergraduate degree in the History of Art and Architecture with English Literature from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Islamic art from SOAS, University of London. She received her PhD from SOAS in 2012. Before arriving in Sussex, she taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Islamic art history at SOAS, University of London and at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.

Role

Lecturer in Art History