Dr Cora Gilroy-Ware

Cora Gilroy-Ware is a scholar of 18th and 19th century sculpture and images of the sculptural body. She is especially interested in how the art of earlier periods, particularly Greco-Roman and Italian Renaissance works, were received and reinterpreted during this time. Her publications and teaching centre on notions of beauty and their entanglement with theories of human difference and the natural world. She has also written extensively about contemporary art, including commissions from Hangar Bicocca in Milan and the Guggenheim Bilbao. Her first book, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain (Yale University press in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020) looked at the reception of the so-called Greek ideal in British sculpture, painting and prints, from the era of the French Revolution to the early Victorian period. In 2024 she was one of three external curators of the major Royal Academy exhibition in 2024 Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change 1768 - Now. 

Cora is currently working on a book that tells stories of unexpected encounters between African American female writers, sculptors and painters, and classical art. She is particularly interested in the idea of Italy in the imaginations of these women. Research for this project was developed during a 2025 Wallace Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, where she shared her ongoing work the classicist Anna Julia Cooper and her friend, activist and art enthusiast Charlotte Forten Grimké. At I Tatti, she carried out new research on the librarian and connoisseur Belle Da Costa Greene. She is part of a small community of scholars working on the long-neglected sculptor Selma Burke, and is a contributor to the forthcoming catalogue for the artist’s first retrospective, Selma Burke: Keeping Sculpture Alive, at the Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. 

As an artist herself, Cora is interested in the relationship between the craft of writing and non-scholarly forms of expression. Her teaching incorporates music, poetry, novels and plays, which she acknowledges have a close kinship with visual art. As well as teaching on sculptural body she also gives a methodological lecture on ecocriticism, one of her developing interests. She convenes the first-year History of Art core course Challenging Antiquities, and teaches a Special Subject, Art and the Invention of Race, and an MSt Option Course, Adventures in Black Classicism. She is responsible for the pastoral care of St Peter’s students.