Tristram Julian William Hunt, FRHistS (born 31 May 1974) is a British historian, broadcast journalist and former politician who has been Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2017.

[10] He later attended the University of Chicago, and was for a time an Associate Fellow of the Centre for History and Economics at King's College, Cambridge.

[14] In 2007 Hunt was a judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize,[15] the winner being Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

[16] For the book, Hunt researched at German and Russian libraries and begins with an account of his own visit to the city of Engels in Russia.

The biography received a number of favourable reviews, including one from Roy Hattersley, the former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, in The Observer.

[23] Hunt was selected to contest the constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central on 1 April 2010, succeeding Labour's outgoing MP, Mark Fisher.

This led to the secretary of the Constituency Labour Party, Gary Elsby, standing against Hunt as an independent candidate in protest.

[29] Hunt was appointed a Shadow Education Minister in April 2013, replacing Karen Buck who advanced as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Ed Miliband.

[30] In February 2014, Hunt crossed an authorised University and College Union picket line at Queen Mary University of London to teach his students about "Marx, Engels and the Making of Marxism", defending himself on the grounds that although he was not a member of the union, he supported the right to strike and picket by those who had been ballotted.

[33] Hunt ran a hapless bid for the leadership of the Labour party but dropped out after less than a week after he was nowhere near gathering the 35 nominations from MPs he needed to stand.

On 12 September 2015, it became known he was leaving the shadow cabinet following Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader because of their "substantial political differences", as Hunt told the Press Association.

[34] On 13 January 2017, he announced that he would be resigning as an MP in order to take up the post of Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

[44] In this role he has advocated for the necessity for creative subjects to be taught in state schools, fearing that designer jobs are considered 'only for the posh.

[47] Hunt, when asked to comment, said that the exhibition was still likely to go ahead, but, in an article for The Art Newspaper, admitted that "some of the loans might now be less forthcoming and sponsorship more of a challenge.

"[48] In June 2023, Hunt ordered the removal of two books on gender and sexual orientation, as well as a poster by the charity Stonewall that read "Some people are trans, get over it!