The Mark Cousins Lecture Archive is a unique set of digitised and fully catalogued recordings spanning nearly 30 years of Mark’s career at the AA. Totalling over 250 lectures. The cataloguing of Mark’s lectures has been both an amazing education and a labour of love for all involved.

The AA thanks Joel Newman and the Audio-Visual Department who spent many hours recording the lectures over the past decades. Thanks is also due to Gabriela Jimenez, Samaneh Karimelahi, Tian Pan, Ke Bo Tsai, Hlib Velyhorskyi and Chuxi Zhou for cataloguing summaries of all the lectures. In addition, the AA is grateful to George Haughton and Ryan Dillon for design, and John Hampson and Michael Moawad.

This archive is a valuable resource for future, current and past students to engage with Mark’s ideas – and to experience Mark, in full flow, in his natural environment, the AA Lecture Hall.

Mark Cousins was born in Bristol in 1947, son of the actress Constance Chapman (1912–2003). He attended Christ's Hospital, Sussex, before reading History at Merton College, Oxford. Upon achieving a First, Mark continued his studies at Oxford and subsequently the Warburg Institute. During the 1970s he taught at a number of institutions, including the Warburg, Brunel University and Thames Polytechnic, were he was instrumental in setting up an MA Programme in Modern European Thought. Shortly after joining the AA teaching staff in 1980, Mark coauthored, with Athar Hussein, Michel Foucault (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984). He was appointed AA Head of General Studies in 1992 and the following year took over as Head of the AA's Graduate Histories and Theories programme. In 1993, Mark was cofounder of the London Consortium, a multidisciplinary graduate programme operating across several institutions, including the AA, Birkbeck College and the British Film Institute. The AA Archives' recordings of Mark's lectures start in 1985, but become more regular from the early 1990s, including his renowned Friday Evening lectures series, which he presented for nearly three decades.

Mark was much in demand as a lecturer and held long term visiting professorships at Columbia University and at South Eastern University, China – also lecturing at a number of international institutions including the Berlage, Harvard, Princeton, the London School of Economics and the Royal College of Arts.