Arts Lecture 2025

Traditionally, the Faculty of Arts starts the new Academic Year with the Arts Lecture. On Tuesday 2 September, Bastiaan Steffens will give the Arts Lecture to mark the opening of the academic year 2025-2026 of the University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts. The title of his lecture is ‘The Imagination of the Museum’. 

Bastiaan Steffens (1988) is Head of Exhibitions and Collections at Museum aan de A in Groningen. He studied Archaeology at Leiden University and worked for six years as Curator of Archaeology at the Drents Museum, where he was responsible for creating major exhibitions, such as Pompeii and The Nebra Sky Disk. As an exhibition maker, he is involved in a wide range of projects at the intersection of history, heritage, and the public. Additionally, he is a board member at UNESCO Global Geopark Hondsrug.

In the Arts Lecture Steffens takes the audience along in the choices and dilemmas surrounding the creation of Museum aan de A: the new history museum for the city and province, where stories are told from prehistory to the present. For now, this museum consists largely of architectural drawings and policy documents—but how do you actually make a museum? Using this process as a starting point, Steffens situates museum practice within the broader debate on how museums today engage with history.