Michael Squire

Michael Squire is Reader in Classical Art at King’s College London. His undergraduate degree was in classics, and his MPhil. was in classical archaeology (both at Trinity College, Cambridge). After a year as a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard (specializing in comparative literature and art history), he returned to Cambridge, where his doctoral thesis focused on theories of word and image in classical antiquity. He moved to King’s in 2011, after holding a junior research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Michael has written three monographs: Image and Text, one on the so-called “Iliac tables,” and The Art of the Body; he has edited nine volumes (on topics ranging from the frames of Graeco-Roman visual culture to Hegelian aesthetics), and around 100 journal articles and book chapters. He is editor of book-series on Greek Culture in the Roman World for Cambridge University Press (with Simon Goldhill and Jaś Elsner), and on Image, Text and Culture in Classical Antiquity for Routledge; he also sits on the editorial board of Art History. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in classics and art history in 2012, and has held recent fellowships in Cologne and Munich as well as at Stanford and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is currently curating a 2018 exhibition on contemporary artistic responses to classical visual culture, housed in Bush House and Somerset House in London.

Michael holds dual British and German nationalities, and divides his time between London and Berlin. During his time at MPIWG, Michael will be working on ideas of vision, description and subjectivity in the Elder Philostratus’ Imagines—a third-century AD Greek text that describes a purported gallery of paintings.