ProfessorFinola O'Kane Crimmins

I research the designed landscape history of Ireland and of the Atlantic world, with a particular interest in the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of this history. My first book 'Landscape design in eighteenth-century Ireland; mixing foreign trees with the natives' was awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize by The Foundation for Landscape Studies, New York in 2007, a prize also awarded to my book 'Ireland and the Picturesque; Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism in Ireland 1700-1830' (2013, Yale/PMC), which also won an Elisabeth Blair McDougall Honorable Mention book award from the US Society of Architectural Historians in 2016. In 2013 a Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) research fellowship funded research for my book 'Landscape design and revolution in eighteenth-century Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815', published by the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press in June 2023, one of six books shortlisted for the 2024 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction, one of four shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and a prizewinner in the 2026 NUI Irish Historical Research awards. I have published widely on eighteenth-century Dublin, Irish urban and suburban history and plantation landscapes, with the volume 'Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary perspectives' co-edited with Ciaran O'Neill published in 2023 by Manchester University Press.
I am a founding and ongoing contributor to the British Library’s 'Picturing Places' website, providing essays on Ireland and the British empire’s wider landscape tradition. I published 'William Ashford's Mount Merrion; The Absent Point of View', a book on the evolution and representation of Dublin's Fitzwilliam estate, in 2012. In the field of conservation I have jointly edited two books with Gillian O'Brien- 'Georgian Dublin' in 2008 and 'Portrait of The City; Dublin and the Wider World' in 2012, the latter as part of the UCD-OPW Framework for Cultural Significance funded research project.
Director of Ireland's leading conservation programme (UCD's Masters in Urban and Building Conservation, MUBC) from 2008-2018, I advise on the conservation and design of many key Irish public and private historic landscapes, particularly those of the Liffey, Boyne, Feale and Blackwater valleys. I provide design and communication strategies for historic landscapes where the narrative must be carefully nuanced for public presentation, in recent years working on Béal na Bláth, the site of Michael Collins' assassination (winner of two RIAI Awards), other military landscapes, Dublin’s historic estate core, and the border landscapes of Northern Ireland. My art exhibition work includes 'The Discovery of Scotland' exhibition at The Hunterian, Glasgow in 2020, 'Shaping Ireland; Landscapes in Irish Art' at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2019 and 'Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690–1840' at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, the first major exhibition of Irish art by a leading world gallery. 
I graduated with a first class honours degree in architecture from UCD in 1993. In 1997 I completed a Graduate Diploma in the Conservation of Historic Landscapes at the Architectural Association in London and my Ph.D. (N.U.I.) in 1999. I worked for a few years in the practice of de Blacam & Meagher Architects, where I was a project architect for the award-winning conservation design of Maynooth Castle, Co. Kildare, and where I also completed my professional part 3 exams to attain membership of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland.
In 2017 I was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy for publication on Irish, American and Caribbean landscape history. In August 2024 I was appointed one of the six Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks by the Board of Trustees for Harvard University. I am a Visiting Fellow in TCD's School of History and Archives 2024-2027.

During the academic year 2026-2027 I am on sabbatical leave at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC and Trinity College Dublin.