The University of Kent annual event celebrating our Rome Centre for Classical and Renaissance studies will take place this year on the 4 April at the British Ambassadors residence in the Villa Wolkonsky.
The schedule for the evening includes the European Innovation in Academia Awards and a lecture by Dr. Thomas Campbell. This will be our second European Innovation in Academia Awards. The Awards recognise individuals who have made a difference in higher education in Europe or North America and celebrate academic creativity and innovation.
Our guest lecturer, Dr Thomas P. Campbell, was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 2008-2017. His academic specialism is the study of Renaissance tapestries and he will lecture on ‘Raphael’s Tapestry Designs for Pope Leo X and their legacy at the Court of Charles I’, taking the Mortlake tapestries based on Raphael’s Cartoons (three of which hang on the walls of the Villa Wolkonsky) as his starting point.
Dr. Campbell studied at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, before embarking on a career that has been dedicated to the preservation, study and promotion of cultural heritage. Having become interested in European tapestries while working on the art and propaganda of the European courts, he became a curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he was appointed Director and CEO of The Met in 2008. Serving for nine years as the ninth Director of the Met, Dr. Campbell pursued a ground-breaking agenda that combined scholarship with accessibility, and reimagined how a museum can engage with diverse, global audiences. His focus was on simultaneously reinforcing the museum’s excellence in faculty, collections, galleries, exhibitions, publications and international engagement while ensuring its scholarship remains accessible, engaging and thought-provoking to a contemporary audience. He has recently stepped down from this position and is currently at the Getty Research Institute and at Waddesdon Manor in the UK as the Getty/Rothschild fellow 2017/18.