Reservations required
Tristram Hunt
The Walter S. Gubelmann Memorial Lecture
Dr. Tristram Hunt is the Director of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) — a family of museums dedicated to the power of creativity. Since taking up the post in 2017, Dr. Hunt 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 (Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2024), and the development of V&A East: two free cultural destinations — V&A East Storehouse and Museum — opening in east London, 2025.
Prior to joining the V&A, Dr Hunt was Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central and Shadow Secretary of State for Education. He has a doctorate in Victorian history from Cambridge University, has worked as a Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
In addition to numerous radio and TV programs for the BBC and Channel 4, 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, most recently, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (2021).
Walter S. Gubelmann was president of the Board of Trustees of The Society of the Four Arts for 25 years. Two memorials mark his contributions. First, funds were raised to establish the Walter S. Gubelmann Memorial Lecture each year, in honor of the former president’s many years as chairman of the lecture committee. Then, two years after his death in 1988, Silver King by sculptor D.H.S. Wehle was installed in the fountain at the entrance to the Esther B. O’Keeffe Building.