Michael Squire

Michael Squire FBA (born 1980) is a British art historian and classicist. He became the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge in 2022. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Squire has research interests in ancient Greek and Roman culture, the legacy of classical art and the history of Western aesthetics (especially in the German Enlightenment).

Early life and education Squire studied Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He returned to the University of Cambridge to complete his PhD on ‘Visual and Verbal interactions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity’. In 2006 he took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, and later obtained a Humboldt Research Fellowship to study at LMU Munich and the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Academic career Squire was appointed as Lecturer in Classical Greek Art at King's College London in 2011, then Reader (2015) and Professor (2018).

Squire has held fellowships at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Cologne, LMU Munich, and Stanford University, as well as at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2012. From 2017 he led a project on ‘Modern Classicisms: Ancient Art and Contemporary Artists in Dialogue’, resulting in a London exhibition on 'The Classical Now': the accompanying catalogue was listed among the Times Literary Supplement‘s ‘books of the year’ in 2018.

In July 2022, Squire was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Research interests Squire's research interests are listed as follows: “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".

Selected works Panorama of the Classical World (with Nigel Spivey; Thames and Hudson / Getty, 2004) Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2009) The Art of Art History in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (edited with Verity Platt; 2010 = Arethusa 43.2) The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (Oxford University Press / I. B. Tauris, 2011) The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (Oxford University Press, 2011) Sight and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2016) The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History (edited with Verity Platt; Cambridge, 2017) Morphogrammata/The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine (edited with Johannes Wienand; W. Fink, 2017) Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry (edited with Avi Lifschitz; Oxford University Press, 2017) The Embodied Object in Classical Antiquity (edited with Milette Gaifman & Verity Platt; 2018; = Art History 40.3) Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity (edited with Nikolaus Dietrich; de Gruyter, 2018) Classical ‘Art History’ (edited virtual edition of Art History journal, 2018) The Classical Now (edited with James Cahill & Ruth Allen; Elephant, 2018) The Art of Hegel's Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History (edited with Paul A. Kottman; W. Fink, 2018)