Dr Teresa Soley

Teresa Soley specialises in late medieval and early modern art. Her research focuses primarily on the Iberian world and cross-cultural exchange, with a special interest in commemorative artworks and their role in the construction of history over the longue durée. Engaging with issues of identity, representation, and race, her work explores topics related to viewership, patronage, and artistic transmission within global contexts, especially in relation to the social and political functions of art in this period.  

She is currently working on several projects related to Italian, African, and Iberian material. Her current book project, Tomb Sculpture in Renaissance Portugal: Memory, Identity, and Empire, offers the first comprehensive survey of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese funerary monuments and critically examines their overlooked historical impact, highlighting the crucial and long-lasting role of tombs memorialising, illustrating, and promoting Portugal’s overseas expansion.

Soley received her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in New York (2022), supported in part by a Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Previously, she completed a Research MA in Art History of the Low Countries at Universiteit Utrecht (2015) and a BA in Art History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Washington and Lee University (2013). She has held curatorial fellowships and visiting researcher roles at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga and Instituto da História de Arte in Lisbon, and the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  Prior to joining Cambridge, she taught history of art at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University, and currently co-convenes the interdisciplinary, object-centred research group Networks of Material Exchange in the Early Modern World.