Dr Hugo Shakeshaft

MA, MSt, DPhil (Oxford)

I studied Classics at Cambridge for my undergraduate, then spent a year as a Herchel Smith scholar at Harvard University. After a Master of Studies in Classical Archaeology at Oxford, I worked for a year in the Greece and Rome department of the British Museum. I returned to Oxford for a DPhil in Ancient History.

I teach Classics, Ancient History, and Classical Art and Archaeology.

My interests principally lie in Ancient Greek history, literature, art, architecture, archaeology, religion, and aesthetics. My research lies at the intersection between the study of the textual and material cultures of the ancient Greek world. A focus of my research to date has been on Greek ideas about beauty in the Archaic and Classical periods, especially their interconnection with the divine. Aesthetic questions and topics have a habit of resisting neat disciplinary boundaries; this is one reason for my fascination in them. At the core of my research is a desire to understand the cultural history of the ancient Greek world through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates detailed analysis of all kinds of textual and material sources.

Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, Princeton University Press (forthcoming).
‘Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 104, Issue 2 (June), 2022, 20–46.
‘The Terminology for Beauty in the Iliad and the Odyssey’, Classical Quarterly 69, 2019, 1–22.

Drawing ancient sites and artworks is an enduring source of joy. So, too, are cricket and frisbee.