Background
Mary Beard was born on January 1, 1955, in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, England, to Roy Whitbread (an architect) and Joyce Emily Taylor (a teacher) Beard.
Mary Beard was born on January 1, 1955, in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, England, to Roy Whitbread (an architect) and Joyce Emily Taylor (a teacher) Beard.
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, 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 eighteen Beard 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.
Beard graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts degree: as per tradition, her BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts degree. She remained at Cambridge for her Doctor of Philosophy degree: she completed it in 1982 with a doctoral thesis titled The State Religion in the Late Roman Republic: A Study Based on the Works of Cicero.
Mary Beard is one of Britain’s best-known classicists, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She has written numerous books on the ancient world including the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town; has presented highly-acclaimed TV series, Meet the Romans and Rome: Empire without Limit; and is a regular broadcaster and media commentator. Mary is one of the presenters for the BBC’s recent landmark Civilisations series. Mary is also a classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and writes a thought-provoking blog, A Don’s Life.
Beard was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2013 Queen's New Year Honours list for her services to Classical Scholarship. She was awarded the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to the Study of Classical Civilization.
(Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writi...)
2013(What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, ...)
2014(This well-established textbook outlines the key factors t...)
1985(At once an entrancing cultural history and a congenial gu...)
2002Mary Beard is non-religious.
Mary Beard is a socialist. 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 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."
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.
Quotations:
"Most women over 50 know what women over 50 look like. And they look like me. They can pretend like they don't, but really they look like me. I'm a classicist, not an autocue girl."
"I've been around long enough to know that most people if they want to kill you, they don't send you a tweet first."
Beard married Robin Cormack, a classicist and art historian, in 1985. Their daughter Zoe is a historian of South Sudan and their son Raphael is a scholar of Egyptian literature.
