Michael’s first degree was in Classics, and his MPhil in Classical Archaeology (both at Trinity College, Cambridge). After a year as Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard, specializing in comparative literature, he returned to Cambridge and completed a PhD on theories of word and image in Graeco-Roman antiquity (2006). Before joining the Department of Classics at King’s, Michael was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College Cambridge, and concurrently held an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and the Winckelmann-Institut für Klassische Archäologie, Humboldt-Universtität zu Berlin. He was elected to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2012, and has also been awarded a 2012 Philip Leverhulme Prize for his research into Classics and Classical art history.

• Graeco-Roman visual culture
• Relations between text and image
• Representations of the body in Greek and Roman art
• Greek and Latin epigram
• Ecphrasis
• Early Christian art and theology
• The Classical tradition
• History of aesthetics (especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany)
• The visual culture of the Reformation
• The cultural history of ornament

Panorama of the Classical World (with Nigel Spivey; Thames and Hudson, 2nd ed. 2008)

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)    

5AACAR10 Building Greece & Rome

5AACAR15 Icons and Idols: The Image of Christ & the Classical Origins of Christian Art  

5ACAR23 Sex and the symposium: The evidence of Athenian painted pottery

6AACAR02 Greek Sculpture 750-300 BC

6AACAR16 The Classical Art of the Body: Greek Sculpture and its Legacy

7AACM820 Greek Sculpture c. 700-300 BC

7AACM825 The Classical Art of the Body: Greek Sculpture and its Legacy

7AACM825 Words and Pictures: Art and Text in the Graeco-Roman World

Michael is always pleased to hear from new PhD students. He is particularly interested in supervising PhD students in:

• Greek and Roman sculpture, painting and other arts
• The history of aesthetics
• Literary traditions of ecphrasis
• Visual representations of Homeric epic
• Collecting ‘art’ in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds

Greek and Roman art and its reception.