Reception with the Vice-Chancellor

Reception with the Vice-Chancellor

Reception with the Vice-Chancellor

event Friday 27 September 2024 schedule 6.30pm - 8.30pm BST
event Friday 27 September 2024 schedule 6.30pm - 8.30pm BST
  • Photograph of the front of the Fitzwilliam Museum
Cambridge University and the Paris Olympics
In-person | £15
Open to: 
Alumni and guests
Location: 
Fitzwilliam Museum | View details

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, is delighted to welcome you to a drinks reception at the iconic Fitzwilliam Museum.

Founded in 1816, the Fitzwilliam Museum is the principal museum of the University of Cambridge and is widely considered the world’s outstanding university art collection. It is internationally renowned for its world-class exhibitions and research. From antiquity to the present day, the Fitzwilliam houses an extraordinary collection of over half a million beautiful works of art, masterpiece paintings and historical artefacts.

To celebrate 100 years from the first Paris Olympics, where Cambridge University students won eleven Olympic medals for Great Britain, co-curators Professors Caroline Vout and Christopher Young will introduce the Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body exhibition, and discuss how the modernist culture of Paris shaped the future of sport and the Olympic Games.

As well as an opportunity to catch up with old friends and new, you can also explore the exhibition with expert insights from the curators.

Speakers

Professor Deborah Prentice

Photograph of Deborah Prentice

Professor Deborah Prentice became the University of Cambridge’s 347th Vice-Chancellor on July 1, 2023.

An eminent psychologist, Professor Prentice carried out her academic and administrative career at Princeton University, which she first joined in 1988. She rose through the academic ranks and took on administrative responsibilities of increasing scope, chairing the Department of Psychology for 12 years, serving as Dean of Faculty for three years, and then serving six years as Provost, with primary responsibility for all academic, budgetary, and long-term planning issues.

Her academic expertise is in the study of social norms that govern human behaviour – particularly the impact and development of unwritten rules and conventions, and how people respond to breaches of those rules. She has edited three academic volumes and published more than 50 articles and chapters, and she has specialised in the study of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and gender stereotypes.

The University Council nominated Professor Prentice for appointment as Vice-Chancellor in September 2022. Her appointment was subsequently approved by the Regent House.

 

Professor Caroline Vout (Newnham 1991)

Photograph of Caroline Vout

Professor Caroline (Carrie) Vout is a historian and art-historian, whose research embraces Greek and Roman art and its reception in the modern period, classical literature, religion, topography, gender, and body history. Carrie has contributed to exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, Tate Britain, and Leiden’s Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, and been sole curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, where she was also part of the team that rehung the Greek and Roman Gallery, and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The catalogue for the HMI show, Antinous: the Face of the Antique (2006)  won the inaugural Art Book Award.

Carrie is a public-facing Classicist who is at home on television, radio and at literary festivals. She is a regular speaker at schools. Three short videos of Carrie talking about sculpture, one of them in the Paris exhibition, can be found here.

At the University of Cambridge, Carrie is a Professor of Classics at the Faculty of Classics, Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, and a Fellow in Classics and Director of Studies at Christ’s College. She is also the Byvanck Chair of Classical Archaeology/Art History at the University of Leiden.

Professor Christopher Young (Pembroke 1987)

Photograph of Chris Young

Professor Christopher (Chris) Young is a Germanist, medievalist and prize-winning historian of modern sport.

His monograph ‘The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany’ was the first to win both the British and North American Societies for Sports History prizes, and his ‘The Whole World was Watching. Sport in the Cold War’ also won the latter’s anthology prize. He co-founded and edited de Gruyter’s Companions to Modern German Culture series and University of California Press’ Sport in World History series, and is on the editorial team of Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum.

Chris’s current research includes a revisionist account of the 1936 Olympics, German sport in the interwar period, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. He is on the German government’s international Historical Commission to reappraise the 1972 Munich Olympics attack.

At the University of Cambridge, Chris is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities, and from 1 October 2024, Master of St Edmund’s College. He is a Fellow of Pembroke College, a Professor of Modern and Medieval German Studies (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics) and Director of the Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies, and the Cambridge-LMU Munich Strategic Partnership.

Dr Rebecca Virag

Photograph of Rebecca Virag

Rebecca has been a member of the Exhibitions team at The Fitzwilliam Museum since 2022 and since then has worked closely with curators on several major exhibitions including Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction (15 March – 29 August 2022) and Real Families: Stories of Change (6 October 2023 – 7 January 2024).

Her current projects are Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body and The Making of Ancient Egypt (working title).

Reading list

For details of our speakers publications, please visit:

Booking information

In-person at the Fitzwilliam Museum, as part of the Alumni Festival. 

Price: 
£15

Location

Fitzwilliam Museum
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1RB
United Kingdom

Contact

Alumni Festival Team
Location: