Humanitas Visiting Professors announced

Lord Foster will give a free public lecture today, as a number of Humanitas Visiting Professorships for the forthcoming year are announced. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Grammy award winning opera singer Jessye Norman and Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Malcolm Rogers, are among the visiting professors who will give lectures and workshops at the University in 2012. Lord Foster, Visiting Professor of Architecture, will speak in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Said Business School at 6pm this evening (Monday 28 November) on 'Heritage and Lessons'. His lecture, which is free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis, will point out that the cathedrals, castles and viaducts that form our 'heritage' were once new themselves and seen as quite alien, and calls on Britain to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th century forebears and revive our traditions of architecture, engineering and landscape design. The lecture and a symposium which will be held on 29 November 2011 were made possible by the support of Lord Weidenfeld. Humanitas is a series of visiting professorships intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, and supported by a series of generous benefactors, the programme in Oxford is a collaboration between the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Humanities Division.