Dr Cora Gilroy-Ware has received a prestigious Wallace Fellowship from the Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a centre for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It also houses a library and an art collection, and it is the site of Italian and English gardens. Wallace Fellowships are designed for scholars who explore the historiography and impact of the Italian Renaissance in the Modern Era. Wallace Fellowships give scholars the valuable time and space they need to pursue their studies and related scholarly activities with a minimum of obligations and interruptions together with a maximum of academic resources.
From January to June 2025, Dr Gilroy-Ware will take up residence in Florence, where she will focus on the writings, work and legacy of the poet, activist and Renaissance art lover Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837-1914) and fellow activist and art lover Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964). The research will inform her forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Sculpting the Self: Women, Race and Classical Art.
About Dr Cora Gilroy Ware
Dr Gilroy-Ware is Fellow and Tutor in the History of Art at St Peter’s College and Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. In her publications, exhibitions and teaching, Dr Gilroy-Ware seeks to challenge the assumed universality of Western hegemonic perspectives. She is particularly interested in the fabrication of ideal beauty from the seventeenth century to the present day, and the role of classicising sculpture and pictorial art in the reification of ‘racial’ difference. She has curated projects at Tate Britain, the Huntington European Art Gallery and MK Gallery, and has held fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntington Library, California Institute of Technology, University of Naples L'Orientale and University College London. Most recently, she co-curated a major Royal Academy exhibition exploring art’s role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism, Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now: Art, Colonialism and Change.
Dr Gilroy-Ware is the author of The Classical Body in Romantic Britain (Yale University Press, 2020). Her current book project, funded with support from the Henry Moore Foundation, will consider adaptations of Greco-Roman art, particularly marble sculpture, among artists of African and indigenous American descent including Phillis Wheatley, Ellen Craft, Mary Edmonia Lewis, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper and Kara Walker.
Learn more about Dr Gilroy-Ware here.
Image of Florence skyline by Olivier Darny (via Pexels).