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Speaker: Neil MacGregor
Museums hold objects that have travelled across time, cultures and empires. In this lecture, Neil MacGregor considers how such objects shape collective memory and public understanding, and asks what role museums might play in an age of renewed debate about history, identity and belonging. Drawing on his experience leading major international institutions, he reflects on how museums can speak to diverse audiences while remaining places of scholarship, encounter and civic exchange.
Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and former museum director. He was editor of The Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, and served as Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, where he oversaw the opening of the Sainsbury Wing and a major rehang of the collection. In 2002 he became Director of the British Museum, a post he held until 2015. During his tenure he presented the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on the Museum’s collection. He later served as founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin until 2018, and has presented a number of programmes on art and cultural history for radio and television, including Germany: Memories of a Nation and The Museums That Make Us. He is currently working with the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai on a long-term display of objects designed to allow Indian universities to teach a new history of the ancient world. He is a member of the Order of Merit.
The I Tatti Mongan Prize is given to a distinguished scholar of Renaissance art or connoisseurship who carries into a new generation the qualities of imaginative scholarship, personal generosity, and devotion to the institutions of art history that were exemplified in their own generation by Agnes and Elizabeth Mongan. Founded by a gift from Melvin Seiden, the prize was first conferred in 1988 on Sydney Freedberg, and successively on Craig Hugh Smyth (1992), Sir Ernst Gombrich (1996), Caroline Elam (2003), Paola Barocchi (2006), Elizabeth Cropper (2011), Hans Belting (2013), Marvin Trachtenberg (2016), Miguel Falomir Faus (2018), and Carmen Bambach (2022).
Image: Cosmological Diagram of the World of Mortals (Jambudvīpa), western India, 18th–19th century. David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries.
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