Dr Matthew Walker

I am a historian of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British architecture in its intellectual and global contexts. Before joining Cambridge, I was a Lecturer in Architectural History at Queen Mary University of London from 2018 to 2025. Prior to that, I taught in the architecture school of the University of New Mexico, and in the art history department of Oxford University. I also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. I have a BA from Oxford and an MA and PhD from the University of York.

My research concerns intellectual engagement with architectural design and practice in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain. My first book, Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. I am currently working on two projects. The first is a book, entitled The Greek Revival. A Prehistory. It concerns British and French engagement with ancient Greek and Eastern Mediterranean architecture in the long seventeenth century. It will show that Western European understanding of Greek architecture was more sophisticated and widespread in the period than has previously been thought. The second is an edition of the correspondence of Sir Christopher Wren. In the past, I have published on medical architecture in London in the late seventeenth century, on architecture’s role in the early Royal Society, and on the administration of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire.