Cora Gilroy-Ware is a specialist in late 18th and 19th century art, with a focus on sculpture and images of the sculptural body. Her research and her teaching take a sustained, critical look at material that has often been dismissed as bland and conventional, particularly classical representations of the beautiful human form that proliferate in “Western" art. 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) examined the evolving 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. She has also written extensively about modern and contemporary art, including commissions from Hangar Bicocca in Milan and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
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 polymath classicist Anna Julia Cooper and her friend, activist and art lover 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 crafts of writing and making. Her teaching incorporates music, poetry, novels and plays, which she acknowledges have a close kinship with visual material. As well as teaching on sculpture and the body she also gives a methodological lecture on ecocriticsm. 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.
