Christ's Fellow Professor Caroline Vout has accepted the London Hellenic Prize in a ceremony at the Hellenic Centre in London. The award, presented by Greek Ambassador to the UK Yannis Tsaousis, was for her book Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body.
The London Hellenic Prize, founded in 1996, recognises original works in English related to, or inspired by, ancient or modern Hellenic civilization, culture, history, or literature.
The winning shortlisted titles in English are usually translated into Greek and published in Greece.
Professor Vout’s book explores the body through ancient artworks not only as conventional representations of beauty or religious devotion, but also by considering the questions that those in the Greek and Roman worlds asked about their bodies including where do we come from? what makes us different from gods and animals?
She reveals the surprising actions people often took to transform their bodies - from sophisticated surgery and contraception to body oils and cosmetics.
The book, co-published by Profile Books and the Wellcome Collection, was awarded the prize for 2022 and praised by the adjudicating committee as a "seminal" work which speaks "authoritatively and consistently about the interactions between human life and political change and their expressions in various art forms and texts – often as attempts to sculpt visions of immortality, but also as expressions of the complex and flawed realities of the human body, its aesthetic pretensions and physical needs."
Professor Vout is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Museum of Classic Archaeology, Chair of Cambridge Visual Culture and Byvanck Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Leiden.
Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body
You can listen to Caroline Vout on Venus, Hermaphroditus, and other Classical Bodies in Art on the The Great Women Artists Podcast.