Autumn Lecture Series 2024: Living with the Gods

(Monday 4th November 2024)

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Neil MacGregor is a British cultural historian, broadcaster and writer. He grew up in Glasgow, studied Modern Languages at Oxford then History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. He edited The Burlington Magazine before becoming, in 1987, Director of the National Gallery in London. During his tenure there he fought to maintain free public access to great paintings and made a number of BBC television series touching on works in the collection including the highly acclaimed Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art.  

From 2002-2015 he was Director of the British Museum.  In that time, he wrote and presented several influential books and series for BBC Radio 4. His continuing preoccupation has been to make available to the widest public objects and stories that make sense of the world, take us into the minds of others, and reveal the ways in which our apparently discrete histories interconnect. In 2017 he wrote and presented a thirty part BBC Radio 4 series Living with the Gods.

From 2015 to 2018 MacGregor was Founding Director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. In 2018 he was chair of the Booker Prize.  He is now International Advisor to the J. Paul Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and to the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai. At the end of 2021 he held the Chaire du Louvre at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.