Professor Michael Squire
- Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology
- Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College
Connect
Location
- Faculty of Classics Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA, Trinity College Cambridge CB2 1TQ, mjs73@cam.ac.uk
About
My first degree was in classics at Cambridge. After an MPhil. in 2002 I studied German, art history and comparative literature as Knox Fellow at Harvard; I then returned to Cambridge for my PhD, and was Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College. Between 2011 and 2022 I taught in the Department of Classics at King’s College London, where I was Director of Research from 2016. I’ve held fellowships and visiting appointments in Berlin, Cologne, Munich and Stanford, as well as at the Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschicthe, Getty and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
I hold both British and German citizenship, and am married with two children (born in 2019 and 2021). I was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.
Series editor: Image, Text and Culture in Classical Antiquity (Routledge); Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press).
Research
Greek and Roman material and visual culture; classical literature, culture and thought; ancient attitudes to the body and sensory archaeology; early Christian art and theology; history of aesthetics (especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany); cultural history of ornament; classical traditions and the legacies of Greek and Roman art; ecphrasis and visual-verbal relations; materialities of text; disciplinary histories of art history, archaeology and anthropology.
Past PhD topics supervised include: literary and monumental Greek epigram; Greek architectural sculpture in the fourth century BC; ancient landscape painting; Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Roman art; monsters in Archaic Greece; Campanian painting workshops; miniaturisation and the gods; Roman sarcophagi, myth and funerary culture; gardens in ancient art and literature; the Neronian grotesque; eighteenth-century attitudes to ancient art; early Christian visual culture; replication in Roman reliefs; Greek and Roman visual representations of Homeric epic; Hegelian aesthetics.
I’m particularly interested in supervising research students in the following areas: Greek and Roman material and visual culture; attitudes to art in antiquity; the Second Sophistic; the history of aesthetics; epigram and literary anthologies; ecphrasis; the history of classical archaeology (at Cambridge and elsewhere).
Teaching and supervision
My teaching is mostly in classical art and archaeology, but it also includes ancient Greek and Latin language and literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to the classical world.