Slade Visiting Professors

*Postponed - Lent Term 2025 Slade Lectures in Fine Art

Please note that due to unforeseen circumstances, the Lent Term 2025 Slade Lectures in Fine Art have been postponed until further notice.

Updates on the lecture series will be posted on the Department website when available.

The Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge was founded in 1869 as the result of a bequest from the art collector Felix Slade (1788-1868). At the same time, similar chairs were founded in the Universities of Oxford and London. Originally Slade Professors were elected, and sometimes re-elected, for three-year terms. In 1961 the practice changed and since then visiting Slade Professors have been elected on an annual basis. Holders of the Chair usually deliver eight public lectures and four classes for students in the department during either the Michaelmas or the Lent Term of their year in office. The Slade Professorship of Fine Art has been held by many of the most distinguished historians of art and architecture from around the world.

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The 2024-2025 Professor of Fine Art is Professor Farshid Moussavi. 

The Department of History of Art is pleased to announce that the 2024-25 Slade Professor of Fine Art is Professor Farshid Moussavi OBE RA. This lecture series is entitled: 'Architecture, Affects, and Agency: Rethinking Ornament, Form, and Style for Social and Ecological Engagement' and will be taking place in Lent Term 2025. 

This lecture series explores how architecture operates as a dynamic agent of cultural, social, and ecological change. Drawing on the concepts of affect and agency, it examines how architectural elements such as ornament, form, and style shape experiences and foster new ways of engaging with the world. The series challenges long-standing binaries—between ornament and construction, form and structure, style and typology—redefining these elements as integral to the production of affective and inclusive spaces.

Through case studies spanning historical and contemporary projects, the lectures delve into architecture’s capacity to connect human and non-human actors, address ecological imperatives, and respond to cultural and societal dynamics. From micropolitical interventions in daily life to architecture’s role in assembling human and non-human ecologies, this series rethinks how architecture can transcend traditional boundaries to create transformative, sustainable, and dynamic spaces for the future.

Dates of lectures: 

• Affect and Agency in Architecture — Tuesday 28^th January 2025, 5-6pm

• Ornament Beyond Symbolism: Affective Engagements in Architecture — Tuesday 4^th February 2025, 5-6pm

• Form and Structure: Transversal Architectures of Affect — Tuesday 11^th February 2025, 5-6pm 

• Style and Typology: Non-representational Forms — Tuesday 18^th February 2025, 5-6pm

• Architecture Reassembling Culture — Tuesday 25^th February 2025, 5-6pm 

• Micropolitics: Architecture’s Social Role — Tuesday 11^th March 2025, 5-6pm

• Architecture and Ecology: Buildings as Human and Non-Human Assemblages — Thursday 13^th March 2025, 5-6pm

• Architecture, Affects, and Agency: Towards Social and Ecological Practice — Tuesday 18^th March 2025, 5-6pm 

All lectures will be held at Lady Mitchell Hall (Sidgwick Site). Lectures are open to all members of the University and the public; no pre-registration is required.

Elections to the Slade Professorship of Fine Art, 2025–2030

The Department is pleased to announced that the following persons have been elected by the ad hoc Board of Electors to the Slade Professorship of Fine Art:

We look forward to welcoming these distinguished individuals to the Department in the coming years.