Mon 17 Sep 2012

Annual Lecture - Neil MacGregor

The second Annual Lecture of the Forum Transregionale Studien will be delivered by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, on the subject “Global Collections for Global Cities”.

All the world's great cities have populations from many cultures, practicing many religions, speaking many languages. How these diverse citizens live together is perhaps the key urban question of our time - what role can museums and galleries play in these new  circumstances? Berlin, Paris and London all have collections and populations - drawn from the whole world. The lecture will explore the question of what civic function these collections can perform today.
 

The lecture will take place on October 29, 2012 in the Rotunda of the Altes Museum Berlin. The occasion of the Annual Lecture is the arrival of over 30 international postdoc-fellows associated with the four programs of the Forum.

Neil MacGregor has been Director of the British Museum since August 2002 and has devoted particular attention to making the Museum’s collection available to the public across the UK and around the world. In both his current and his previous role as Director of the National Gallery, Neil worked closely with BBC radio and television to achieve this aim. In 2010 the British Museum and the BBC worked together on a project telling A History of the World in 100 objects. At the heart of this project was the British Museum/BBC Radio 4 series of a hundred 15-minute episodes, based on objects from the British Museum’s collection. The book from the series has now been translated into many languages.

Neil MacGregor read French and German at New College, Oxford, and studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He took an LLB in Law at the University of Edinburgh and was called to the Scottish Bar. He then studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. After university lecturing in art-history for some years, in 1981 he became Editor of the arts periodical – The Burlington Magazine – and then in 1987, Director of the National Gallery. Mr MacGregor sits on the Board of the National Theatre, London and the International Advisory Board of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

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