Mary Beard (ancient historian)

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Mary Beard (2017)

Dame Winifred Mary Beard , DBE , FSA , FBA (born January 1, 1955 in Much Wenlock , Shropshire , England ) is an English ancient historian and suffragette .

Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College there . She is the Editor of Classical Studies for the Times Literary Supplement and runs the blog A Don's Life in Times Online (which also appears as a column in The Times ). She was widely known through numerous media appearances, controversial statements about the causes of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the publication of the story of her own rape during a trip to Italy in 1978.

Life

Mary Beard (2012)

Beard is the only child of the architect Roy Whitbread Beard and the headmistress Joyce Emily Beard, née Taylor. She attended Shrewsbury High School, a semi-public school for girls, and took part in archaeological digs regularly while in school. At the age of 18 she began her studies at Newnham College, a women-only college in Cambridge. She had rejected enrollment at King's College Cambridge after she found out that no scholarships were given to women there. At Newnham College, Joyce Reynolds and Patricia Elizabeth Easterling were among their teachers. Beard received her BA in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1982 from Cambridge. PhD.

From 1979 to 1983 Beard was a lecturer in Classics at King's College London . In 1984 she returned to Cambridge and was made a Fellow of Newnham College. She was the only female lecturer in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge University at the time. In 1985 Beard married the art historian Robin Sinclair Cormack , with whom they had a daughter that same year and a son two years later. In 1992 she became classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and in 2004 Professor of Classics at Cambridge.

After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 , Beard was invited, along with other authors, to the London Review of Books to express their opinion on the world political event. She believed that once the shock subsided, many people would understand that the United States had it coming, and that the bullies of this world, even if they did would have the heart in the right place, would pay the bill in the end (“World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price”), a position that in the American discussion as Roosting Chickens argument referred to as. Storms of indignation erupted both in the professional world and in the general public. In an interview in November 2007, however, Beard believed that the view had now taken hold that international terrorism was linked to US foreign policy.

In 2004 Beard was a member of the board of trustees of the exhibition From Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In autumn 2008 she held a series of lectures on the Roman Laughter as Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California at Berkeley , and in November 2009 the Geddes-Harrower Lectures at the University of Aberdeen on From Ancient Athens to Old Aberdeen: artists and archaeologists, travelers and tourists in the nineteenth century .

After an appearance on the television series Question Time in January 2013, in which she spoke positively about immigrants and their contribution to society, Mary Beard was the victim of Twitter attacks, in which she was sometimes insulted and personally attacked. Beard defended herself publicly by posting these comments on her blog , including a photoshop- generated pornographic montage that was sent to her. Since other women were attacked in a similarly aggressive manner on Twitter. For example, journalist Caroline Criado-Perez and Labor MP Stella Creasy sparked a lengthy debate in the UK media and beyond how such attacks could most effectively be countered.

Awards

In 2005 she was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries . In 2008 she received the Wolfson History Prize for her book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town . In July 2010, Mary Beard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy . On April 19, 2011, she was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2012 she became an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . In 2013 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). For 2016, she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize, worth 50,000 euros, in the social sciences category. In the same year she received the Bodley Medal of the Bodleian Library and was elected a member of the Academia Europaea . In 2018 she was ennobled as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

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Beard works on various aspects of ancient Roman, but also Greek history and culture such as social history , religion , sexuality and gender and also on the history of art and literature as well as the history of reception and science in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also takes into account auxiliary and peripheral disciplines such as epigraphy and museum history . She has had a particular interest in the city of Pompeii since her youth .

The Cologne ancient historian Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp wrote about her publications: “With an elegant style, but with a sharp pen and merciless sharpness, she wants to declare to take apart all previous research in a sovereign and critical way and the thicket of deceptive certainties and dusty prejudices, traditional manual wisdom and to clear up stubborn orthodoxy. "The Tübingen archaeologist Manuel Flecker commented on her Pompeii book:" One can hardly ignore Beard's unnecessary habitus, often explicitly dismissing or praising other, always unnamed researchers, in order to be the center of the interpretive sovereignty as a decisive instance of knowledge. "

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

  • Women & Power: A Manifesto. Profile Books, London 2017, ISBN 978-1-78816-060-5 .
    • Women and power. A manifesto . Translation by Ursula Blank-Sangmeister. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2018.
  • SPQR. A History of Ancient Rome . Livery Publishing Co., New York City, USA 2015, ISBN 978-0-87140-423-7 .
    • German translation: SPQR. The millennial history of Rome. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-10-002230-1 .
  • Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up. University of California Press, 2014, ISBN 0-520-27716-3 .
    • Laughter in ancient Rome. A cultural story. Translated from the English by Carsten Drecoll. Zabern, Darmstadt 2016.
  • The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found . Harvard University Press, 2008. Also under the title Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. ISBN 1-86197-516-3 .
    • German translation: Pompeii. Life in a Roman city . Philipp Reclam Verlag, Ditzingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010755-3 .
  • The Roman Triumph . Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Mass. 2007, ISBN 978-0-674-02613-1 (Book review by Greg Woolf: Pomp and circumstance. In: The Guardian , Saturday 22 December 2007 [4] ).
  • (with Keith Hopkins ): The Colosseum . Harvard University Press, 2005, ISBN 1-86197-407-8 .
  • The Parthenon . Harvard University Press, 2002, ISBN 1-86197-292-X .
  • (with John Henderson ): Classical Art from Greece to Rome . 2001, ISBN 0-19-284237-4 .
  • The Invention of Jane Harrison . Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-674-00212-1 .
  • (with John North and Simon RF Price ): Religions of Rome . 1998, ISBN 0-521-30401-6 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-45015-2 (vol. 2).
  • (with John Henderson): Classics: A Very Short Introduction. 1995, ISBN 0-19-285313-9 .
    • German translation in: Paul G. Bahn, Mary Beard, John Henderson: Paths to antiquity . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-476-01683-8 .
  • (with Michael Crawford ): Rome in the Late Republic . 1985, revised 1999, ISBN 0-7156-2928-X .

Editorships

  • (Ed., With John North): Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World. 1990, ISBN 0-7156-2206-4 .

Essays

  • While Ridgeway lives research can ne'er be dull. In: C. Stray (Ed.): The Owl of Minerva: Cambridge Praelections 1906. (Cambridge, 2004)
  • Ciceronian Correspondences: making a Book out of Letters. In: TP Wiseman (Ed.): Classics in Progress , (London, 2002), pp. 103-144.
  • The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the "Great Mother" in Imperial Rome. In: Nicholas Thomas, Caroline Humphrey (eds.): Shamanism, History, and the State (1996), pp. 164–189 Google Books [5]
  • Re-reading (Vestal) virginity. In: Richard Hawley, Barbara Levick (Eds.): Women in Antiquity. New assessments . Routledge, London / New York 1995, ISBN 0-415-11368-7 , pp. 166-177.
  • Looking (harder) for Roman myth: Dumézil, declamation and the problems of definition. In: Fritz Graf (Ed.): Myth in a society without myths: the paradeigma of Rome (Colloquium Rauricum III, Stuttgart, 1993), pp. 44-64.
  • Souvenirs of culture: deciphering (in) the museum. In: Art History. 15: 505-532 (1992).
  • A Complex of Times: no more sheep on Romulus' birthday. In: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. 1987, pp. 1–15 (reprinted in: C. Ando (Ed.): Roman Religion (Edinburgh, 2003))
  • The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins. In: Journal of Roman Studies . 70: 12-27 (1980).

Web links

Short biographies

  • Page in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (with photography) [6]
  • Page in Newnham College, Cambridge [7]
  • Short biography bibliography in: Times Online, January 8, 2004 [8]
  • Short biography bibliography in: The International Who's Who of Women 2002 [9]

Newspaper articles about and interviews with Mary Beard

Blog

  • A Don's Life , Times Online [13]

Contributions to newspapers and magazines

  • A very modern emperor , The Guardian, Saturday 19 July 2008 [14]
  • Airing the Classics , Times Online, January 18, 2008 [15]
  • Foreword on the series of articles The Greek Myths , The Guardian, Friday 18 January 2008 [16]
  • Tacitus was no elitist , The Guardian, Tuesday 16 January 2007 [17]
  • A radical, short-lived and violent experiment: the origins of democracy , The Guardian, Saturday 29 April 2006 [18]
  • Power + knowledge + sex =? , The Guardian, Friday 18 August 2006 [19]
  • Apart from vomitoriums and orgies, what did the Romans do for us? , The Guardian, Saturday 29 October 2005 [20]
  • The never ending story , The Guardian, Friday 30 April 2004 [21]
  • Contribution to September 11th. In: London Review of Books, vol. 23 no. 19, 4 October 2001 [22]
  • The Story of my rape , The Guardian, Friday 8 September 2000 [23]
  • Articles in: The New Review of Books, archive [24]

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary Beard, The Story of my rape , The Guardian, Friday 8 September 2000 [1]
  2. ↑ Beard even published advice for working mothers: The Good Working Mother's Guide (1989), ISBN 0-7156-2278-1 .
  3. ^ Mary Beard as of September 11th. In: London Review of Books. vol. 23 no. 19, 4 October 2001 [2] .
  4. ↑ The name refers to a book by Ward Churchill , On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of US Imperial Arrogance and Criminality . AK Press, 2003, ISBN 1-902593-79-0 .
  5. ↑ Paul Laity, The dangerous don , Interview, in: The Guardian. Saturday 10 November 2007 [3]
  6. ^ Sather Professor of Classical Literature 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley Archived copy ( Memento of January 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Geddes-Harrower Lectures 2009 https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/3400/
  8. ↑ Ben Dowell: Mary Beard suffers 'truly vile' online abuse after Question Time ". The Guardian , January 21, 2013, accessed August 4, 2013 .
  9. ↑ Cambridge professor under fire for Boston immigration comments on BBC Question Time ". Boston Standard , January 21, 2013, accessed August 4, 2013 .
  10. ^ Lark Turner: In Britain, an Authority on the Past Stares Down a Nasty Modern Storm. The New York Times, February 15, 2013, accessed February 16, 2013 .
  11. ^ Bomb threat tweet sent to classicist Mary Beard. BBC News, August 4, 2013, accessed August 4, 2013 .
  12. ↑ Elected Fellow of the British Academy, July 2010 ( Memento from September 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Appointment as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 2011 ( Memento of the original from April 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.amacad.org
  14. ^ Member History: Mary Beard. American Philosophical Society, accessed April 26, 2018 (with a short biography).
  15. ↑ Beard, an ancient historian, receives the Princess of Asturias Prize , Deutschlandradio Kultur, accessed May 28, 2016
  16. ^ Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, ​​review on Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Cambridge, Mass. 2007, in: Gnomon 82 (2010), pp. 130-136, here 130.
  17. ↑ http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensions/2012-2-141
  18. ↑ Listening to the ancient Romans in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung November 9, 2015, page 61
personal data
SURNAME Beard, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beard, Winifred Mary (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Much Wenlock