Professor Matthew Walker

Matthew is an Official Fellow, Director of Studies in History of Art, and Admissions Tutor for the Arts and Humanities. At the University, he is Assistant Professor in British Architecture at the Department of History of Art. 

Biography

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.

Teaching

At Cambridge, I teach across the History of Art Tripos, with a particular focus on British urban and architectural history, as well as the history of architectural writing and theory. I am currently the director of undergraduate teaching and admissions convenor for History of Art.

Research

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 a number of 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. Secondly, I am preparing a scholarly edition of David Loggan's celebrated Oxford and Cambridge Illustrata with an extensive introductory essay and a complete guide to the production and content of both series. Thirdly, I am co–editing, with Professor Anthony Geraghty, the letters of Sir Christopher Wren, which will be published in time for the 400th anniversary of his birth in 2032. 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.