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Mary Beard Biography & Facts

Dame Winifred Mary Beard, (born 1 January 1955) is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. Beard 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". In 2014, The New Yorker characterised her as "learned but accessible". Early life and education 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 girls' school then funded as a direct grant grammar school. She was taught poetry by Frank McEachran, who was teaching then at the nearby Shrewsbury School, and was the inspiration for schoolmaster Hector in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys. During the summer she would join archaeological excavations, though the motivation was, in part, just the prospect of earning some pocket-money. At 18 she sat the then-compulsory entrance exam and interview for Cambridge University, to win a place at Newnham College, a single-sex college. She had considered King's, but rejected it when she learned the college did not offer scholarships to women. In Beard's first year she found 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. One of her tutors was Joyce Reynolds. 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 has cited Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess as influential on the development of her personal feminism. Beard graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. As was traditional, her BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. She remained at Cambridge for her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree, completing it in 1982 with a doctoral thesis titled The State Religion in the Late Roman Republic: A Study Based on the Works of Cicero. Academic 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. The book Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with Cambridge historian Michael Crawford, was published the following year. John Sturrock, classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, approached her for a review and brought her into literary journalism. Beard took over his role in 1992 at the request of Ferdinand Mount. 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". In a November 2007 interview, she stated the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, though she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy. By this point she was described by Paul Laity of The Guardian as "Britain's best-known classicist". In 2004, Beard, through internal promotion, became Professor of Classics at Cambridge. In 2007–2008, Beard gave the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. 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". On 14 February 2014, Beard delivered a lecture on the public voice of women at the British Museum as part of the London Review of Books winter lecture series. It was recorded and broadcast on BBC Four a month later under the title Oh Do Shut Up, Dear!. The lecture begins with the example of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, admonishing his mother to retreat to her chamber. (The title alludes to Prime Minister David Cameron telling a female MP to "Calm down, dear!", which earned wide-spread criticism as a "classic sexist put-down".) Three years later, Beard gave a second lecture for the same partners, entitled "Women in Power: from Medusa to Merkel". It 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. She argues that "we don't have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like. We only have templates that make them men." On 5 January 2019, Beard gave the sesquicentennial Public Lecture for the North American Society for Classical Studies, marking the 150-year anniversary of the organisation. The topic of her presentation was "What do we mean by Classics now?" She delivered the Gifford Lectures in May 2019 at Edinburgh University, under the title 'The Ancient World and Us: From Fear and Loathing to Enlightenment and Ethics'. In March 2020, Beard was appointed a trustee of the British Museum. In September 2023, Profile Books published Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World. Writing for Literary Review, Harry Sidebottom called it "her best book so far". Approach to scholarship University of Chicago classicist Clifford Ando described Beard's scholarship as having two key aspects in its approach to sources. One is that she insists that ancient sources be understood as documentation of the attitudes, context and beliefs of their authors, not as reliable sources for the events they address. The other is that she argues that modern histories of Rome must be contextualised within the attitudes, world views and purposes of their authors. Television work In 1994 she made an early television appearance on an Open Media discussion for the BBC, Weird Thoughts, alongside Jenny Randles among others. This was characterised in an article in 2021 as follows: Weird Thoughts, where Tony Wilson chairs a panel of experts debating why the 1990s seem so very strange.... Discover the Mary Beard popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Mary Beard books.