Jonty Stern
Sir John Soane’s Museum

Jonty Stern is a visitor assistant at Sir John Soane’s Museum, where he has worked since 2011. His academic route into museums was not a conventional one. His degree is in Welsh Studies, with a focus on comparative Celtic linguistics, from the University of Wales. While there, he also studied German and Biblical Hebrew and developed his French through the Modern Breton programme, which required knowledge of both Welsh and French. He later returned to university, first in Weymouth to complete an NVQ in Museum Studies, and then in London, where he studied Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, archaeology, and the parks and gardens of London, and was awarded a Green Badge in Tourist Guiding. His interest in museums and history has grown steadily over time. After working in market research during the 1980s and 1990s, he moved into the museum sector in 2000 and is now in his fourth paid museum role, having previously worked at the RAF Museum, the Museum of Docklands, and the Museum of London. He has also volunteered with a number of institutions, including the Jewish Museum, the Handel House Museum, the British Red Cross Museum, and the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo collection. He has appeared on several television programmes, including Big Brother (2007), The One Show (2008), The Weakest Link (2009), and My Family History Revealed (2018). He also took part in a programme hosted by Susie Dent in which museums were to compete in a format similar to University Challenge, although the series was never commissioned and the episode was not broadcast.