Hugo Shakeshaft, PhD

Hugo Shakeshaft studied Classics at Cambridge for his BA, then spent a year as a Herchel Smith scholar at Harvard. After a Masters in Classical Archaeology at Oxford, he worked for a year in the Greece and Rome department of the British Museum. He returned to Oxford for a DPhil in Ancient History and subsequently became a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church college.

His research lies at the intersection between Classics, Art History, and Aesthetics and incorporates various textual and material sources. A focus of his work to date has been on Greek ideas about beauty, especially their interconnection with the divine; this is the subject of his first monograph, Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). In 2023 he was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter by College Art Association for his article, ‘Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited’, The Art Bulletin 104.2, 2022, 20-46.