The Humanitas Visiting Professorship

Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities.

Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the Programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and administered in Cambridge by CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. The Humanitas Visiting Professors each deliver a series of three public lectures within the University over a period of a week, and the host Department, working with CRASSH, also mounts a half-day Symposium to advance discussion of the themes raised in the lectures.

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in the History of Art is supported, via the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, by the generosity of J.E. Safra, to whom the Department is extremely grateful. The Professors are hosted by Clare College. The standing committee that selects the Professors includes representation from the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as the Department and CRASSH.

In 2012-13 the Chair is held by Philippe de Montebello, Director Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Fiske Kimball Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Professor de Montebello's three lectures, on the subject of 'The Mulitple Lives of the Work of Art', took place on 15, 20 and 21 November 2012. For further details please see the poster by clicking on the link on the right of this page.

Future Humanitas Visiting Professors in the History of Art will be Pierre Rosenberg (2013-14), formerly Director of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Rick Brettell (2014-15), Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair in the Interdisciplinary Program in Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.