Hugo Shakeshaft is a classicist, art historian, and artist. He is a specialist in the cultural history of ancient Greece and its legacy. His research ranges across ancient literature, history, philosophy, art, and archaeology. At the heart of his work is a fascination with aesthetics, with how people in antiquity perceived the world. The place of beauty in ancient Greek culture has been a focus of his research to date.

Hugo was born and raised in London. He graduated with a double first in Classics from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, in 2012. After a year at Harvard as a Herchel Smith Scholar, he completed a Masters in Classical Archaeology and then a doctorate in Ancient History at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Since 2018 he has held research fellowships at Christ Church College, Oxford, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He is currently A.W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Since he was able to hold a pencil, art has been at the centre of Hugo’s life. Making, viewing, and teaching others about art are great personal sources of joy. He believes they also hold immense value for society at large: to foster connections between people, between people and their environment, between cultures past and present. Work with museums therefore plays a prominent role in Hugo’s career. Nothing sparks his imagination and brings the ancient world to life better than art and archaeological sites, the tangible vestiges of a distant past.