Occupation Classical scholar Name Mary Beard | Role Scholar | |
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Full Name Winifred Mary Beard Children Zoe Cormack, Raphael Cormack Parents Roy Whitbread Beard, Joyce Emily Beard Books Confronting the Classics, Pompeii, Laughter in Ancient Rome: O, It's a Don's Life, The Roman Triumph Similar People Robin Cormack, Simon Price, Michael Crawford, A A Gill, Bettany Hughes | ||
Winifred Mary Beard, OBE, FSA, FBA (born 1 January 1955) is an English scholar and classicist.
Contents
- Mary beard on spqr the history of ancient rome
- Early life
- Career
- Approach to scholarship
- Honours
- Personal life
- Books
- References
She is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. She is the Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, where she also writes a regular blog, "A Don's Life". Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist".
Mary beard on spqr the history of ancient rome
Early life
Mary Beard, an only child, was born on 1 January 1955 in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Her mother, Joyce Emily Beard, was a headmistress and an enthusiastic reader. Her father, Roy Whitbread Beard, worked as an architect in Shrewsbury. She recalled him as "a raffish public-schoolboy type and a complete wastrel, but very engaging".
Beard was educated at Shrewsbury High School, a private school for girls. During the summer she would join archaeological excavations, though the motivation was, in part, just the prospect of earning some pocket-money.
At eighteen she sat the then-compulsory entrance exam and interview for Cambridge University, to win a place at Newnham College. She had considered King's, but rejected it when she learned the college did not offer scholarships to women.
Although Newnham was a single-sex college, in Beard's first year she found that some men in the university still held very dismissive attitudes regarding the academic potential of women, which only strengthened her determination to succeed. She also developed feminist views that remained "hugely important" in her later life, although she later described "modern orthodox feminism" as partly cant. Beard has since said that "Newnham could do better in making itself a place where critical issues can be generated" and has also described her views on feminism, saying "I actually can't understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist."
Beard graduated with a BA (Hons), which was, in due course, converted to an MA. She remained at Cambridge for her 1982 Ph.D. thesis entitled, The state religion in the late Roman Republic: a study based on the works of Cicero.
Career
Between 1979 and 1983, Beard lectured in Classics at King's College London; she returned to Cambridge in 1984 as a Fellow of Newnham College and the only female lecturer in the Classics faculty. Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with Cambridge historian Michael Crawford, was published the same year.
Beard became Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement in 1992. In 1994 she made an early television appearance on an Open Media discussion for the BBC, Weird Thoughts, alongside Jenny Randles and James Randi among others.
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought "the United States had it coming", and that "[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price" (the so-called "Roosting Chickens argument"). In a November 2007 interview, she stated that the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, although she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy.
In 2004, Beard became Professor of Classics at Cambridge. She was elected Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she delivered a series of lectures on "Roman Laughter".
In December 2010, on BBC Two, Beard presented the graphic historical documentary, Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town, submitting remains from the town to forensic tests, aiming to show a snapshot of the lives of the residents prior to the eruption of Vesuvius. In 2011 she took part in a television series, Jamie's Dream School on Channel 4, and for BBC Two in 2012 she wrote and presented the three part television series, Meet the Romans with Mary Beard, which concerns how ordinary people lived in Rome, "The world's first global metropolis". Beard is a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 4 series, A Point of View, delivering essays on a broad range of topics including Miss World and the Oxbridge interview.
Beard received considerable online abuse after she appeared on BBC's Question Time from Lincolnshire in January 2013 and spoke positively about immigrant workers living in the county. Beard quoted abusive comments that she had received on her blog as a result, and reasserted her right to express unpopular opinions and to present herself in public in an authentic way.
On 4 August 2013, she received a bomb threat on Twitter, hours after the UK head of that social networking site had apologised to women who had experienced abuse on the service. Beard said she did not think she was in physical danger, but considered it harassment and wanted to "make sure" that another case had been logged by the police.
In April 2013, she was named as Royal Academy of Arts professor of ancient literature.
In July 2013 Beard admitted that she had knowingly, repeatedly, and illegally ridden her bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street.
In August 2014, Beard was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.
In December 2015 she was again a panelist on BBC's Question Time from Bath.
2016 saw Beard present Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard on BBC One in March. While May 2016, brought about a four-part series shown on BBC Two, titled Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit.
On 3 March 2017, Beard gave a lecture on "Women in Power" at the British Museum as part of the London Review of Books winter lecture series. The talk considered the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded, and how idioms from ancient Greece are still used to normalise gendered violence.
Approach to scholarship
According to University of Chicago classicist Clifford Ando, Beard is noted for two aspects of her approach to sources:
Honours
Personal life
Beard married Robin Cormack, a classicist and art historian, in 1985. Their daughter was born later that year and their son in 1987.
In July 2015, Beard endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. She said: "If I were a member of the Labour Party, I would vote for Corbyn. He actually seems to have some ideological commitment, which could get the Labour Party to think about what it actually stands for."