Arthur MacGregor is a British academic and author, "who largely invented the idea of the history of museums". MacGregor has spent most of his career at the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University ...

, before his appointment as director of the Society of Antiquaries. He has been president of the Society for the History of Natural History since 2015, when he succeeded

Hugh Torrens Hugh Simon Torrens (born 1940) is a British historian of geology and paleontology, and Emeritus Professor of History of Science and Technology at Keele University. Torrens received a bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford and a PhD from ...

. MacGregor is founder of the Journal of the History of Collections which he edited from 1989-2023."Editorial changes at the ''Journal of the History of Collections''", ''Journal of the History of Collections'', Volume 35, Issue 3, November 2023, Pages 411–412

Selected works

*2024. ''St Helena : An Island Biography.'' BOYDELL PRESS. *2023. ''The India Museum Revisited.'' UCL Press. *2018. ''Naturalists in the Field: Collecting Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century.'' (editor) 2018. Leiden: Brill. *2018. ''Company Curiosities : Nature Culture and the East India Company 1600-1874.'' 2018. London: Reaktion Books. *2015. ''The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities: An Anglo-Irish Country House Museum.'' New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press. *2012. ''Animal Encounters : Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War One.'' London: Reaktion Books. *2007. ''Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century.'' New Haven Conn: Yale University Press. *2000. ''The Ashmolean Museum Oxford.'' Munich: Prestel. *1994. ''Sir Hans Sloane: Collector Scientist Antiquary Founding Father of the British Museum.'' London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press in association with Alistair McAlpine. *1985. (with Oliver Impey). ''The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe.'' 1985. Oxford: Clarendon.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:MacGregor, Arthur Living people Academics of the University of Oxford People associated with the Ashmolean Museum Year of birth missing (living people)