Michael Govan

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries (2013-2014)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries is a unique initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to examining the crucial role that cultural institutions play in society. Ambitious in its scope, the initiative holds Visiting Professorships that bring individuals of outstanding practical and academic expertise to the University Oxford, which is home to some of the oldest and most important museums, libraries and collections in the Western world.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture.

The Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries has been made possible by the generous support of Foster + Partners and is hosted by Balliol College, Oxford.

Michael Govan is the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In Michael Govan’s public lecture, entitled A Voice from the Pacific: Re-envisioning the Art Museum he offers his thoughts on what the museums of the 21st century could be. He questions the fundamental purpose of traditional encyclopaedic museums and suggests ways of making museums representations of the present rather than repositories of the past.