Giles Waterfield Memorial Lecture: What are university museums for today?

Giles Waterfield was an expert on the history of museums. He was also an innovative and talented museum director. Yet perhaps even he would have been surprised by the challenges the Museum sector currently faces, regionally, nationally and internationally that have required both local and global responses.

What, these days, are museums for? Especially those whose primary collections are of European art? And what role in particular might university museums play? How might they support, or even play a leading role, in change?

Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, explores these questions and how the role of university museums can include demonstrating how items in collections can provide simple roads to histories that are often complex, containing no easy answers about the past, but plenty of clues that point to the present.

Tickets, which include a free drink, can be booked via the gallery’s website.