Faculty of Classics - University of Cambridge

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Mary Beard: honorary professorship

Mary Beard has been appointed the Royal Academy's Professor of Ancient Literature.

 

Prof. Beard takes over the post from  the late Cambridge Professor Eric Handley. Here is the Royal Academy press release:

At a recent General Assembly meeting at the Royal Academy of Arts, Professor Mary Beard was ratified as the Royal Academy’s Professor of Ancient Literature. The honorary position of Professor of Ancient Literature was instituted in 1770, soon after the Royal Academy’s founding. Previous post-holders include Samuel Johnson and the Rt. Revd. William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury. Professor Mary Beard takes over from Professor Eric Handley, who died earlier this year. 

The Royal Academy of Arts Library holds a significant Historic Book Collection and has long collected classical literature in translation, it being historically assumed that students of the RA Schools would not have had Greek or Latin. The Professors of Ancient Literature would have been on hand to offer advice to the students in this field and may have helped with selecting good translations of the Classics for the library, or even to have provided translations themselves. The Historic Book Collection includes many rare titles reproducing the masterpieces of medieval and post-Renaissance European art and architecture; detailed archaeological surveys of the civilisations of Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt; and original editions of virtually all the early treatises on painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, anatomy, perspective, colour theory, art collecting and connoisseurship.

Professor Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College.  She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog, A Don’s Life which appears in The Times as a regular column.  Mary Beard researches and writes on a wide range of classical topics; her book Pompeii: Life in a Roman town (2008) won the Wolfson Prize for History and was the basis of a BBC2 documentary shortlisted for a BAFTA.

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