Carrie Vout is a cultural historian and art historian with a particular interest in the Roman imperial period and its reception (see e.g. her monographs, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, Cambridge University Press, 2007, The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, London and Berkeley, 2013, Classical Art: a Life History from Antiquity to the Present, Princeton, 2018, Exposed: the Greek and Roman Body, Profile/Wellcome Collection, 2022, her exhibition catalogues, Antinous: Face of the Antique, Leeds (HMI), 2006, and Following Hercules: the Story of Classical Art (Fitzwilliam Museum), 2015, and the co-edited volume with Helen Lovatt, Epic Visions: Visuality in Greek and Latin Epic and its Reception, Cambridge University Press, 2013).
She has published academic articles in, among others, the Journal of Roman Studies, Arion, Ramus, Art History, Journal of the History of Collections, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, and contributed chapters and reviews to numerous collections of essays and companions. Forthcoming publications include ‘Lucan, Statius and the piercing eroticism of war’, in Lee Fratantuono (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Latin Epic, 14-96 CE; ‘The stuff of crowded sanctuaries’ in M. Haysom, M. Milli and J. Wallensten (eds.) The Stuff of the Gods: the Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece (Swedish Institute, Athens); 'Greek myth and the politics of empire', in F. Meinel (ed.) The Cambridge Guide to Greek Myth and the Mediterranean (Cambridge); and 'The classical and Biblical in dialogue: a conversation in Victorian sculpture’ in S. Goldhill and R. Jackson Ravenscroft (eds.) The Shock of the Old: Victorian Engagements with the Biblical and Classical Pasts (Cambridge). She is an editor of Omnibus, a ‘correspondant' of Perspective (National Institute of Art in Paris) and on the advisory board of the Sculpture Journal.
Carrie has curated exhibitions (at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Henry Moore Institute), appeared on television, and on In Our Time, Woman’s Hour, and Start the Week. She is currently Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) and co-Director of Cambridge Visual Culture. From Michaelmas 2019 until 2024, Carrie is also the Byvanck Chair of Classical Archaeology/Art History at the University of Leiden.
In 2024, she will co-curate with Chris Young, the exhibition 'Paris 1924: the Art of the Olympics’. To watch Carrie in a series of recent videos made for MOCA, see The Peplos Kore, Discobolus, and Antinous.
