Alistair John Rowan

Alistair John Rowan is an Irish architectural historian, a retired university teacher, a building conservationist and an author of British, Irish and Italian architectural history.

Rowan was an architectural writer with Country Life before 1967, when he became lecturer in Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter Rowan became the first professor of the History of Art in University College, Dublin (U.C.D.), and later Principal of Edinburgh College of Art.

Photographs contributed by Rowan to the Conway Library are currently being digitised by the Courtauld Institute of Art, as part of the Courtauld Connects project. In 2018, Rowan and Ann Martha Rowan despoisted "The Alistair and Ann Martha Rowan Collection of Architectural Publications" at the Irish Architectural Archive.

Rowan has served on the Council of the National Trust for Scotland, on the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland and has been President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland.

Personal life On 20 July 1968, Rowan married the British archivist and editor Ann Martha Rowan, with whom he had a daughter. Rowan is the brother-in-law of the British academic Charlotte Roueché. Alistair Rowan, ‘Bob the Roman’ Heroic Antiquity & the Architecture of Robert Adam, London, Sir John Soane's Museum, 2003 Alistair Rowan, Vaulting Ambition: The Adam Brothers, Contractors to the Metropolis in the reign of George III, London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007 Susanna Pasquali and Alistair Rowan, Alessandro Papafava e la sua raccolta, Vicenza, Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 2019 Kenneth Milne and Alistair Rowan, St. Bartholomew’s, A History of a Dublin Parish, Dublin, Hinds, 2019