Amongst of the brand new trustees appointed to the British Museum is an educational skilled against the return of antiquities taken from their nation of origin in colonial contexts, such because the museum’s most contested holding, the Parthenon Marbles.
Dr. Tiffany Jenkins, a broadcaster and sociologist, is one in all a number of new trustees with a four-year time period for the favored London establishment. The four other new trustees are TV broadcaster and author Claudia Winkleman; journalist and conservative politician Daniel Finkelstein; historian and podcaster Tom Holland; in addition to former BBC radio information anchor Martha Kearney. George Osborne has been chairman of the British Museum’s board since 2021.
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Jenkin notably is the creator of the e-book Conserving Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Previous Ended up in Museums… and Why They Ought to Keep There, which examines the complicated problem of how objects such because the Parthenon Marbles are assimilated into accumulating establishments. The subject contains the rise of repatriation claims, to which Jenkin responded that museums are beneath no obligation to return or repatriate such artifacts even when appealed.
The Parthenon Marbles, often known as the Elgin Marbles, are a frieze of sculptures that when adorned the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. They have been eliminated between 1801 and 1815 by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, which occupied Greece then. Elgin claimed an Ottoman chief granted permission for his or her extraction, and the British Museum in the end acquired the sculptures in 1816. Disputes over their rightful possession between the UK and successive Greek governments have been ongoing for 4 a long time.
Final July, Secretary of State for Tradition, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy introduced a need to “finish the unnecessary get together politicization of those appointments and draw on the widest pool of expertise,” together with extra folks from exterior of London and South East England.
The board’s different 15 members included the Indian-American Amazon govt Priyanka Wadhawan, economics professor Abhijit Banerjee, economist Weijian Shan from China in addition to the Colombian-American philanthropist Alejandro Santo Domingo.
