Biography
Carrie was born in Durham. She was an undergraduate at Newnham College, returning there after a MA at the Courtauld Institute in London, to do her PhD. She taught at London, Bristol and Nottingham Universities, before being appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge and a Fellowship at Christ's College in 2006. She is now Professor of Classics.
Research
Forthcoming publications include 'Lucan, Statius and the piercing eroticism of war', in L. Fratantuono (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Latin Epic, 14-96 CE; ‘The stuff of crowded sanctuaries’ in M. Haysom, M. Milli and J. Wallensten (edd.) The Stuff of the Gods: the Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece (Swedish Institute Athens); 'Greek myth and the politics of empire', in F. Meinel and K. Schorle (eds.) The Cambridge Guide to Greek Myth and the Mediterranean (Cambridge); 'Antinous in antiquity: an image between Egypt, Greece and Rome', in L. Capodieci et L. Bricault (eds.) Immortal Egypt: The Afterlife of the Ægyptiaca in Early Modern Visual Arts (Brepols); 'Greece and Rome: comparative perspectives', in K. Olson and S. Corner, The Routledge Handbook to Gender and Sexuality; and 'Beyond representation: art and enargeia in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica', Classical Antiquity (2024). In 2024, Carrie will co-curate 'Paris 1924: Sport, Art, the Body' at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum. You can listen to Carrie talking about her research here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/carrie-vout-on-venus-hermaphroditu....
Publications
Books
2022 Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body. Profile / Wellcome. Winner of the 2022 London Hellenic Prize.
2018 Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton University Press.
2015 Following Hercules: the Story of Classical Art. Fitwilliam Museum (exhibition catalogue).
2013 Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome. British Museum Press and University of California Press.
2012 The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City. Cambridge University Press.
2007 Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome. Cambridge University Press.
2006 Antinous: the Face of the Antique (catalogue to accompany exhibition of ancient sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 25 May to 27 August 2006).
Co-edited books
2013 With Helen Lovatt, Epic Visions. Cambridge University Press.
Selected articles/chapters
2023 'The classical and biblical in dialogue: a conversation in Victorian sculpture', in S. Goldhill and R. Jackson Ravenscroft (eds.) Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity (CUP).
2023 '‘Spolia’ as category: Greek and Roman perspectives', in I. de Jong and M.-J. Versluys (eds.) Reading Greek and Hellenistic-Roman Spolia (Leiden): 265–83.
2022 ‘Beyond beautiful?’, British Museum Magazine (Winter 2022) (London) 41–3.
2022 ‘Bodily objects’, in R. Osborne (ed.) A Cultural History of Objects in Antiquity (c. 500 BCE-500 CE) (Bloomsbury): 161–83.
2021 ‘Portraiture and memory sanctions’, in A. Raimondi Cominesi et al. (eds.) God on Earth: Emperor Domitian (Leiden): 175–81.
2020 Beyond Classical Art: A Lecture on the Diversity of Greek and Roman Sculpture (The BABESCH Foundation, Leiden).
2019 ‘Collecting like Caesar: the pornography and paideia of amassing artefacts in the Roman empire and afterwards’, in M. W. Gahtan and E.-M. Troelenberg (eds.) Collecting and Empires: The Impact of the Creation and Dissolution of Empires on Collections and Museums from Antiquity to the Present (Brepols, 2019): 68–85.
2018 ‘Sexuality’, in C. Norena (ed.) Cultural History of Western Empires in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2018): 153-76.
2018 'The aesthetics of Roman error', in B. Dufallo, Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Reception of Rome's Flaws (OUP, 2018): 15–36.
2017 'Contraception in the Roman Empire' in C. M. Kelly (ed.) Keith Hopkins: Sociological Studies in Roman History (CUP, 2018) ch. 1.
2017 'Art and the decadent city', in S. Bartsch, K. Freudenburg and C. Littlewood (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Nero (CUP, 2017): 179–94.
2017 'Pater's Apollo in Picardy and the art of scholarly method', in C. Martindale, S. Evangelista and E. Prettejohn (eds.) Pater the Classicist. Oxford University Press: ch. 9.
2016 (with Robin Osborne) 'Art and religion in ancient Greece and Rome', in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Online publication date, May 2016: http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/ 10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-81
2015 'Romantic visions: collecting, display and homosexual self-fashioning', in J. Ingleheart (ed.) Ancient Rome and the Construction of Western Homosexual Identities. Oxford University Press: 232-51.
2014 Entries on John Gibsonʼs ʻThe Hours Leading the Horses of the Sunʼ and ʻPhaeton, ʻBruccianiʼs casts of the Parthenon friezeʼ, ʻLaocoon by the Barbedienne Foundryʼ, ʻFrederic Leightonʼs ʻAthlete Wrestling a python", ʻVincenzo Gemitoʼs ʻNarcissus" and ʻTommaso Sauliniʼs ʻPhaeton driving the Horses of the sun", in M. Droth, J. Edwards and M. Hatt (edd.) Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837-1901. New Haven.
2014 ʻThe funerary altar of Pedana and the rhetoric of unreachabilityʼ, in J. Elsner and M. Meyer (edd.) Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture. Cambridge University Press: 288-315.
2014 'Gender Studies', in C. Marconi (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Architecture. Oxford University Press: 600-20.
2014 'The end of the Greek Revolution?' Perspective 2: 246–52.
2013 'Biography', in T. Hubbard (ed.) A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities. Oxford. 446-62.
2013 'La "nudité héroïque" et le corps de la "femme athlete" dans la culture grecque et romaine', in F. Gherchanoc and V. Huet (edd.) Vêtements antiques: s'habiller, se déshabiller dans les mondes anciens'. Paris, 2013: 239-52.
2013 'Epic in the round', in H. Lovatt and C. Vout (edd.) Epic Visions: Visuality and the Latin Epic and its Reception. Cambridge University Press: 191-217.
2013, 'Face to face with fiction: portraiture and the biographical tradition', in M. Ledbury (ed.) Fictions of Art History. Williamstown, MA: 71-86.
2013 Entries on 'Nudity', 'The seven hills of Rome' and 'Love: (conjugal, filial, romantic)', in R. Bagnall et al. (edd.) Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Oxford, 2013.
2013 'Tiberius and the invention of succession' in A. G. G. Gibson, The Julio-Claudian Succession: Reality and the Perception of the 'Augustan Model'. Leiden: 59-78.
2012 'Treasure, not trash: The Disney sculpture and its place in the history of collecting', Journal of the History of Collections 24.3: 309 – 326.
2012 ''Unfinished business: re-viewing Medea in Roman painting', Ramus 41: 119-143.
2011 'Putting the art into artefact', in S. Alcock and R. Osborne (edd.) Classical Archaeology 442-67.
2010 'From the ancient world to world art', World Art 1.1: 135-41.
2010 'Hadrian, Hellenism and the social history of art', Arion 18.2: 55-78.
2010 'Laocoon's children and the limits of representation', Art History 33.3: 397-419.
2010 'Toga' in S. Settis et al. (edd.) The Classical Tradition: a Guide. Harvard University Press: 938.
2009 'Representing the emperor', in A. Feldherr (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. 261-75.
2009 'The Satyrica and Neronian culture', in J. Prag and I. Repath (edd.) Petronius: a Handbook. Wiley-Blackwell: 101-13.
2008 'The art of damnatio memoriae' in S. Benoist (ed.) Un discours en images. Metz: 153-172.
2007 'Sizing up Rome or theorising the overview', in D. Larmour and D. Spencer (eds.) The Sites of Rome: Time, Space and Memory. Oxford University Press : 295-322.
2007 'Greek and Roman Art', in The Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. New York, Macmillan.
2006 'Winckelmann and Antinous', Cambridge Classical Journal/Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 52: 139-62.
2006 'What's in a beard? Rethinking Hadrian's hellenism', in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (edd.) Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece. Cambridge University Press: 96-123.
2005 'Antinous, Archaeology and History', Journal of Roman Studies 95 : 80-96.
2004 'A revision of Hadrian's portraiture', in L. du Blois et al. (eds.) The Representation and Perception of Imperial Power. Amsterdam: 442-57.
2003 'Embracing Egypt', in C. Edwards and G. Woolf (eds.) Rome: the Cosmopolis. Cambridge University Press : 177-202.
1996 'The myth of the toga: understanding the history of Roman dress', Greece and Rome 43.2: 204-20.
Carrie has published reviews in Art History, Times Literary Supplement, Journal of Roman Studies, Journal of Hellenic Studies, The Classical Review, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Ancient West and East, Perspective, Urban History, The European Review of History, Hermathena, History Today, The Burlington Magazine, The Journal of Religious History, Ancient History Bulletin, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Sehepunkte, and Gnomon and written pieces for Apollo, Minerva and the Observer.
Teaching and Supervisions
Recent PhD topics include: Representations of the humpback in Greco-Roman culture; Visualising Rome's Foundation myths; Neo-classicism reassessed; Violence in Roman art; The use of corporeal description in Roman political discourse; A cultural history of Roman engraved gemstones, their iconography, material and function; The classical in the contemporary: the relationship of Greco-Roman art and myth to contemporary art in Britain; Britannia's bodies: corporeal representation and the art of Roman Britain; portraits and identity in Roman Greece; the mythology of ekphrasis in Rome and Roman Greece; the female body in Roman visual culture; visual power and elite subjectivity in private portraiture from Imperial Greece; Sketching, Sight-seeing and Scholarship: Greece and Asia Minor, 1828-1898; the aesthetics of the corpse in ancient Roman culture.
Recent MPhil areas include: Roman cultural history (especially sexuality); Greek and Roman material and visual culture (including Christianity); Latin literature (especially ecphrasis), reception studies.
