Arthur MacGregor

Arthur MacGregor is a British academic and author, "who largely invented the idea of the history of museums".^[1]

MacGregor in 2008

MacGregor has spent most of his career at the Ashmolean Museum, before his appointment as director of the Society of Antiquaries.^[2]

He has been president of the Society for the History of Natural History since 2015, when he succeeded Hugh Torrens.^[3]

MacGregor is founder of the Journal of the History of Collections which he edited from 1989-2023.^[4]

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.