Part of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2013: Being | Human

Taking a long perspective on image worship, in the cult of the Virgin Mary and other saints, Marina Warner will look at the life of images in the digital era and at the influence they exert; she’ll attempt to explore the ethical problems around picturing pain and death.

Biography
Marina Warner was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. After primary schools in Cairo and Brussels, she was educated in England at St Mary’s Convent, Ascot, and then read French and Italian as an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow.

Since 2004 she has been a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She teaches MA courses in Creative Writing; The Tale, and another one on psycho-geographical writing, Memory Maps. She is also visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi from January 2012.

She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005, and was made a CBE for services to literature in 2008. She is President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA)  for the period 2010-2016 and was elected a two-year Fellow at All Souls College Oxford in 2013.

She is currently a trustee of The National Portrait Gallery and patron of Hosking Houses Trust, Reprieve and The Society for Storytelling.

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