WRITING
Hugo’s research concentrates on Greek culture during the Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 700–300 BCE). He works on a variety of ancient sources, from the Homeric epics to Greek sculpture, temples, and archaeological sites. He is captivated by ancient cultural attitudes to big topics, like beauty and the nature of representation, that remain meaningful today and can, through their similarities and differences with contemporary attitudes, shed light on the present.
His research interests include: aesthetics; early Greek epic; Archaic lyric; Greek religion; the relationship between texts and images; Greek art, visual culture, and its reception; the relationship between Greek and ancient Near Eastern literature and archaeology.
Hugo’s work has been published in academic journals of international standing. In 2023, he was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association for his article, ‘Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited’, The Art Bulletin 104 (2022). For notice of the award, please see here.
His first book, Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, published by Princeton University Press, comes out in March 2025. More information about the book can be found here. He is currently writing a new monograph about lifelikeness in Greek art, which delves into an early chapter in the history of pictorial illusionism.
Key publications:
Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, Princeton University Press (2025).
‘When Letter Met Figure: Inscriptions and Images in Archaic Greece’, Hesperia (2025).
‘Cruel Fate and the Beginning of the End in Iliad 16’, Omnibus 86 (2023), 1-3.
‘Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited’, The Art Bulletin 104 (2022), 20-46.
‘The Terminology for Beauty in the Iliad and the Odyssey’, Classical Quarterly 69 (2019), 1-22.
‘Beginning with the earliest Greek literature, the epics of Homer and Hesiod, beauty was seen as having a special connection with the divine. The gods of ancient Greece were defined by their exceptional beauty; even today, ‘to look like a Greek god’ is proverbial for human beauty. In Beauty and the Gods, Hugo Shakeshaft explores the relationship between the beautiful and divine in ancient Greece, principally in the Archaic period (ca. 750–480 BCE). Analysing evidence that ranges from poetry, art, and philosophical texts to architecture and the natural landscape, Shakeshaft shows how ideas and experiences of beauty shaped Greek relations with the divine.
With a powerful call for the place of beauty and aesthetics in the writing of history, Shakeshaft uncovers the cultural dialogue between beauty and the gods in a variety of contexts in the Archaic Greek world: in forms of divine worship; in poetry, music, and dance; in attitudes to the natural environment; and in architecture and art. This early chapter of Greek history, he argues, holds an unrecognised key to understanding some long-running threads in the histories of religion, art, and aesthetics, from Plato’s aesthetic theories to beauty’s status in contemporary discourse. Beauty’s deep past and divine connection in ancient Greece can help us see beauty now in sharper focus.’