Short Biography
Tomás Ó Carragáin is a graduate of UCC and the University of York and became a lecturer in the Department in 2002. His research interests include early medieval architecture and sculpture, early ecclesiastical territories and organization and archaeological approaches to ritual practice including pilgrimage. He is co-author of Inishmurray: Monks and Pilgrims in an Atlantic Landscape (2008), editor of the Journal of Irish Archaeology (2007-2009) and is on the Council of the Society for Medieval Archaeology (2008-2011). He has recently completed a book entitled Churches in Early Medieval Ireland. Architecture, Ritual and Memory (Yale University Press forthcoming 2010). This is the first in-depth study of churches in Ireland from the arrival of Christianity to the early stages of the Romanesque around 1100. In addition to analysing the buildings themselves it also considers their role as focal points in wider ritual and political landscapes, and includes the most detailed analyses to date of the layout of major ecclesiastical complexes including Armagh, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough.
Current Research
Current research projects include a programme of survey and excavation, funded by the Royal Irish Academy, at Toureen, Co. Tipperary: the site of an important early monastery with over eighty cross-slabs and the earliest closely-dated high cross in Ireland or Britain. He is Principal Investigator of the Making Christian Landscapes project which seeks to investigate the impact of Christianity on the burial and settlement patterns and landscapes of early medieval Ireland and other areas of Atlantic Europe. This project is funded by the Heritage Council through the INSTAR programme. He also recently initiated the Corpus of Early Medieval Architecture of Ireland (CEMAI) project, the principal outcome of which will be a comprehensive online survey, focusing in the first instance on ecclesiastical architecture. See individual project pages for details.
