‘Spectacular gestures’: Great Exhibitions and Great Museums in London and Dublin

Dr Tristram Hunt is Director of the V&A - the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance. Since taking up the post in 2017, he has championed design education in UK schools, encouraged debate around the history of the museum’s global collections and overseen the transition to a multi-site museum, with the opening of V&A Dundee, the creation of Young V&A (formerly V&A Museum of Childhood), and the development of V&A East - a new museum and open access collections centre in Stratford, East London.

Prior to joining the V&A, Tristram was Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central (2010-2017) and Shadow Secretary of State for Education (2013-2015). Between 2001-2010, he combined his post as Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, with work as a history broadcaster, presenting a range of radio and television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. Dr Hunt has a doctorate in Victorian history from Cambridge University (1995) and he is the author of several books, including Ten Cities That Made an Empire (2014), The Lives of the Objects (2019) telling the story of the V&A collection, and The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (2021).

Tristram is a Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Council of the Royal College of Art, and President of the William Morris Society. He played a key role in helping to save the Wedgwood Collection from dispersal and is Patron of the British Ceramics Biennial and he has been awarded honorary doctorates by Staffordshire University and Northumbria University.