Director of British Museum opens first Life-Writing Conference

The conference, opened by President Dame Hermione Lee and entitled ‘Lives of Objects', was held over three days, and attracted scholars from around the world interested in material culture, visual culture, and museums studies, as well as curators, biographers, and historians.      

Neil MacGregor's lecture, entitled ‘And one thing in its time plays many parts', focused on the ways in which objects can be both agents and actors in their own stories and how they can be appropriated, reappropriated, and reinterpreted by people and peoples with their own stories to tell.

Drawing from the British Museum's vast collections, he, for example, described how the Rosetta Stone was originally an unimportant member of a set of 18 stones detailing tax arrangements, but had undergone a dramatic change, similar to that of a “chorus girl” going out to Hollywood and coming “back a star”.

Further plenary lectures were given by Edmund De Waal, Ceramic Artist and author of the bestseller ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance', and Jenny Uglow, biographer and author of ‘The Lunar Men' and ‘The Pinecone'. 50 scholars from a wide range of backgrounds gave 20-minute papers, and delegates were also given private tours of the Ashmolean, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, and the Museum of the History of Science.

This conference was the first of many events that OCLW will be holding over Michelmas term and the 2013/2014 academic year. The next event will be a lecture given by Kathryn Hughes, Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia, on Tuesday 22 October. 

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