FORA.tv Speaker - Marc Pachter

Marc Pachter was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC in July 2000. From 1994 to 2000, he was counselor to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institute. For most of his career at the Smithsonian, he served as chief historian of the National Portrait Gallery, with particular interest in America's cultural relationship with the non-American world and with the function of biography as a genre of history. Dr. Pachter is the editor of Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art in which seven acclaimed biographers interpret the art of biography. Dr. Pachter was also chair of the delegation of America's cultural critics to the Soviet Union in 1989. From 1985 to 1990, he was senior cultural advisor to the United States Information Agency. An author and editor with a particular interest in cultural history and biography, Dr. Pachter has conducted public interviews for the Smithsonian with such notable figures as Agnes de Mille, William L. Shirer, Umberto Eco, Katharine Graham, and Walter Cronkite. Dr. Pachter graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He served as on the faculty of Salzburg Seminar Session 212, Contemporary American Literature, in 1982; he was a participant at the Salzburg Seminar-Smithsonian Institution Symposium on Public History and National Identity in 1999, and served as chair of Salzburg Seminar Session 387, Museums in the 21st Century, in 2001.