04/09/2026
Delighted that Professor Flood, an outstanding friend to UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy, providing guest lectures, mentorship and inspiration to faculty and staff, was conferred yesterday with Honorary Doctorate of Arts in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the history of art and his pioneering scholarship on Islamic art, architecture and material culture.
Renowned Irish art historian Finbarr Barry Flood has been conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Arts in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the history of art and his pioneering scholarship on Islamic art, architecture and material culture.
One of the world's foremost historians of medieval and early modern art, Professor Flood's scholarship has transformed understanding of the relationships between art, religion, trade and cultural exchange across the Middle-Ages.
His award-winning research has challenged the tendency to associate particular artistic forms exclusively with particular religious traditions.
Instead, Professor Flood's work highlights the importance of cultural and economic exchange between communities and across extensive trading networks, showing how the movement of people, objects, motifs and ideas shaped societies across Africa and Asia.
Beginning his career with a landmark study of the Great Mosque of Damascus, published in 2000, his scholarship has encouraged historians, archaeologists and art historians to look beyond conventional ideas of cultural boundaries and focus instead on encounters, exchanges and interactions between societies.
“Where others have retroactively seen only conflict and conquest, Flood finds trading links and knowledge exchanges that prompt a curiosity about the foreign but also prompt innovations that transform the local,” said Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty, UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy, delivering his citation.
“Objects are portable, and so are the designs and even the ideas they carry with them. The movement of people and of things, Flood reminds us, is not solely a characteristic of our own time, but has long enriched cultures across Africa and Asia just as it does in our own university today.”
Educated in the history of art at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh, Professor Flood is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities at New York University, where he has spent most of his academic career. He is also the founder and director of Silsila, a Center for Material Histories at NYU.
His contributions have been recognised internationally. He has delivered the prestigious Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford and their equivalent at the Louvre Museum in Paris, and has held fellowships at leading institutions including the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, the Getty in Santa Monica and the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
He has also spoken on numerous occasions at Dublin's Chester Beatty Library, renowned for its collection of medieval Islamic manuscripts.
UCD is recognising Professor Flood for his considerable contribution to the writing and understanding of art history, and for scholarship that has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of cultural exchange and material histories across the medieval and early modern world.
The honorary degree was conferred by UCD President Professor Orla Feely during a special ceremony at UCD's O'Reilly Hall. See less
