Dr Teresa Soley

Teresa Soley is a historian of late medieval and early modern European and global art specialising in the Iberian world and cross-cultural exchange. Emphasising interdisciplinary approaches and the study of extra-canonical material, her research and teaching engage with issues of patronage, reception, transmission, and materiality. She has a strong interest in the social and political functions of art and architecture—in particular, expressions of power and the ways in which artworks have been used to construct, appropriate, and promote identities, imagery, and historical narratives, both in their original contexts and over the longue durée.

Her current book project, the first comprehensive study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese funerary monuments, reassesses their overlooked artistic and historical significance. It argues that tomb sculptures played a central role in articulating and promoting imperial ideology and imagery during the overseas expansion, and reveals how they have continued to shape historical perceptions and cultural identity into the present day. Her latest research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust, investigates early modern Afro-European interactions, focusing on the artistic outcomes of sustained contact between Portugal and four parts of Africa: Morocco, the Gulf of Guinea, the Kingdom of the Kongo, and Ethiopia. Drawing on a wide range of material, visual, and documentary evidence, this project recentres African societies within the history of early modern art, illuminating how relationships shaped by trade, diplomacy, conversion, and conquest catalysed major artistic developments in this period.

Teresa received her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, supported by a Kress Predoctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). She holds an MA in Art History of the Low Countries from Universiteit Utrecht and a BA in Art History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Washington and Lee University. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, she taught Art History at Columbia University and the University of Connecticut. She is the organiser of the Networks of Material Exchange research group and co-convenes the History of Art Early Career Research Forum.