JIM HARRIS
Contact
Email: jim.harris@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
Academia edu: Jim Harris
ORCID: 0000-0002-6792-0384
The Teaching Curator blog
University of Oxford webpages
Biography
Jim Harris is the Museum's Teaching Curator, leading the Ashmolean's academic engagement programmes across the curriculum of the University of Oxford, a post originally established by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and now generously supported by the Barrie A and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Jim trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he wrote his PhD thesis on the polychrome sculpture of Donatello, under the supervision of Professor Patricia Rubin. He subsequently held the Courtauld's Andrew W Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship in Conservation.
His research employs the technical examination of sculptural materials and surfaces, alongside archival work, to investigate issues of artistic and patronal intention and the shifting meanings of objects.
In 2012, Jim came to Oxford as part of the Mellon-funded University Engagement Programme, where he took on responsibility for exploring the use of the Ashmolean’s collections in university pedagogy; devising and delivering teaching across a wide range of disciplines; and training faculty and early-career researchers to deploy objects and images in developing a more diverse, equitable and inclusive teaching practice.
He is also responsible for the Ashmolean Faculty Fellows programme, which offers Oxford faculty the opportunity to work in the Museum to develop new, collections-based teaching and plays a leading role in the Ashmolean's strategy for Public Engagement with Research, particularly in relation to early-career scholars. He has curated collaborative exhibitions and gallery interventions at the Ashmolean with Mathematicians, Historians, Linguists and contemporary artists, and has received two Teaching Excellence Awards from the University, as well as a Humanities Division Teaching Project Grant for the Krasis programme. He has published on object-based teaching and spoken widely on the subject in the UK, Europe and North America.
In 2025, Jim and a team of colleagues in neuroscience, psychiatry, history and theology received the Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching and Learning, in recognition of Diversity in Death and Dying, a part of the medical curriculum which uses the Ashmolean's collections to focus discussion on issues raised by end-of-life care, palliation, chronic degenerative disease and the role of the medical professional in relation to their patients and their families and communities. Jim is a member of the University's Medical Humanities Steering Committee, which received the Vice Chancellor's Award for Research Culture, also in 2025.
In 2021, Jim was elected a Research Fellow of Somerville College, in recognition of his contribution to the teaching life of the college and the university and to the work of the Somerville Medieval Research Group.
In other lives, Jim trained and worked extensively as an actor and musician, was a director of the contemporary gallery Man & Eve and is Chair of Trustees of the educational charity Our Hut, which teaches on architecture and the built environment in inner-London schools and communities. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 2, a Licensed Lay Minister in the Church of England, and sits on the Heritage and Collections Committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
