Humanitas Visiting Professors announced

28 November 2011 - OXFORD

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Arts and Design - Literature/Linguistics

Shirin Neshat, Humanitas Visiting for Contemporary Art 2011-12

Lord Foster will give a free public lecture today, as a number of Humanitas Visiting Professorships for the forthcoming year are announced.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Grammy award winning opera singer Jessye Norman and Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Malcolm Rogers, are among the visiting professors who will give lectures and workshops at the University in 2012.

Lord Foster, Visiting Professor of Architecture, will speak in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Said Business School at 6pm this evening (Monday 28 November) on ‘Heritage and Lessons’. His lecture, which is free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis, will point out that the cathedrals, castles and viaducts that form our ‘heritage’ were once new themselves and seen as quite alien, and calls on Britain to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th century forebears and revive our traditions of architecture, engineering and landscape design. The lecture and a symposium which will be held on 29 November 2011 were made possible by the support of Lord Weidenfeld.

Humanitas is a series of visiting professorships intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, and supported by a series of generous benefactors, the programme in Oxford is a collaboration between the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Humanities Division. Each visiting professor delivers a series of lectures, workshop or masterclass for students, and then takes part in a related symposium.The events are hosted by a College and are supervised by an Oxford University academic.

For this academic year, confirmed Visiting Professors include Jonathan Sacks (Interfaith Studies), former director of the Metropolitan Opera Joseph Volpe (Opera Studies), historian and writer Saul Friedländer (Historiography), Jessye Norman (Classical Music and Music Education), artist Shirin Neshat (Contemporary Art), economist Sir Partha Dasgupta (Economic Thought) and Malcolm Rogers (Museums, Galleries and Libraries).

Malcolm Rogers will give lectures and a masterclass in May 2012 and will be hosted by Balliol. Professor Seamus Perry of Balliol and the Faculty of English Language and Literature said: "It is a tremendous honour and pleasure to welcome Malcolm Rogers to Balliol and to Oxford as the second Humanitas Professor of Galleries, Museums, and Libraries, a post made possible by the generosity of Foster + Partners, and inspired by Lord Weidenfeld and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Mr Rogers is one of the most brilliant directors of his generation, widely celebrated for his remarkable work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston over the last fifteen years, and we look forward very much to hearing his thoughts about museums past, present, and future."

Shirin Neshat’s professorship, made possible by the support of Ivorypress, will take place from 7-11 May 2012. Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, who will host her at Magdalen College, said: “The New York-based artist Shirin Neshat is best-known for her hauntingly beautiful films, which explore the nature of Islam and gender relations in her native Iran. Famously described as Artist of the Decade in The Huffington Post , the impact of her work reflects 'the most vital and far-reaching struggle to assert human rights', and we are delighted to welcome her to Oxford as next year's Humanitas Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art.”

Humanitas lectures and symposia are open to University students and academics as well as members of the public. The events are free to attend but places must be booked. is available on the Humanities Division's website.

Humanitas Visiting Professors announced

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