̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Mary Beard

̽��ֱ��Classicist who wants the ancient world to have a radical future

cg605 — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 17:04:17 +0000

Mary Beard says the Greeks and Romans have more to say about modern society than we might think. A new set of films, aimed at teenagers whose schools don’t teach Classics, will investigate how the subject can help us to explore modern issues like free speech, heroes and self-imaging.

Classics shorts with Mary Beard

cg605 — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:01:04 +0000

Celebrity guests join Professor Mary Beard and colleagues in a new series of films, that explore modern day classroom themes, through the lens of the ancient world.

Cambridge academics recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours 2018

ts657 — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 21:30:00 +0000

Professor Mary Beard was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) while Master of St John's College, Professor Christopher Dobson, was awarded a Knights Bachelor and Dr Richard Henderson, Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College and Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, was recognised with a Companion of Honour.

Three other Newnham College alumnae joined Professor Beard in becoming Dames in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2018, announced today - actor Emma Thompson, civil servant and diversity champion Sue Owen, and local government CEO Stella Manzie.

They join a range of women honoured for women at the forefront of their professions or who have championed women’s rights to coincide with the 100th anniversary year of women’s suffrage.

Dame Mary has been recognised for her services to the study of Classical Civilisation.

She said: “I am absolutely 100% delighted – especially to realise that Classical Civilisation is still taken seriously enough to be recognised in this way.

"That said, I expect a good few jokes about pantomime dames!”

Beard’s work on classical civilisation has been matched by her engaging TV work and an inspiration teaching that together have brought the classics to hundreds of thousands of people world-wide – and to hundreds of students at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

Her latest work, Women and Power, investigates the roots of the silencing of women in the Classical period, taking it forward into the present day.

But she will be remembered by generations of undergraduates, not as the famous figure on the television screens, or even the fearless debater of Twitter, but as their supervisor.

Newnham classics student Charlie Pemberton said: “It was Mary who encouraged me to apply to Cambridge and indeed Newnham in the first place: we had emailed a bit when I was in sixth form, before she met me at a Newnham Classics Open Day."

“As a supervisor, she is incredibly fair: she gives praise when it is due, but isn’t afraid to tell you when you’ve been a numpty (to put it lightly...!). Her warning never to take a source at face value - to do some digging to discover what it’s really getting at - proved invaluable in my exams.

"She didn’t just teach us the material, but how to handle or think with the material - and she makes the material so accessible and memorable. There is something so special about Newnham Classics, and I think Mary has come to symbolise that.”

Beard is herself an alumna of Newnham College, Cambridge, where she first studied Classics in 1973. She returned as a Fellow in 1984, at the time the only female lecturer in the Classics Faculty. She became Professor of Classics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in 2004.

Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, says: “This is well-deserved recognition of the outstanding contribution that Mary has made to the study of Classics and the promotion of public understanding of classical civilisation, a further accolade in Newnham’s highly-distinguished tradition in Classics.”

̽��ֱ��Master of St John’s was honoured with a knighthood in recognition of his ground-breaking research into Alzheimer’s disease

Professor Christopher Dobson has been was awarded a Knights Bachelor in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2018 to commemorate his illustrious scientific career.

Sir Christopher was recognised for his contributions to Science and Higher Education.

Sir Christopher is one of the world’s leading scientists working at the interface of the physical and biological sciences. Among other high-profile scientific achievements, in 2013 he co-founded the £50 million Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases (CMD).

Scientists at the Centre focus on analysing the origins of neurodegenerative conditions - such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases - which occur because of ‘misfolded’ protein molecules. ̽��ֱ��experimental work by Sir Christopher and his inter-disciplinary research team has led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field.

Sir Christopher said he was astonished to have been made a knight and dedicated the honour to his students and scientific colleagues.

He said: “I am truly humbled to receive this remarkable honour. It would not have been possible without the brilliance and dedication of my students and scientific colleagues over many years, whose commitment to improving the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions is deeply impressive.”

“It also recognises the commitment of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and the UK Higher Education sector in general, to educating to the highest possible standards the most able and deserving students on whose shoulders the future of the world depends.”

Sir Christopher was educated at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford and became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Harvard ̽��ֱ�� before he returned to Oxford as Professor of Chemistry.

In 2001 he moved from Oxford to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge when he was appointed as the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology and elected a Fellow of St John’s College. He became Master of St John’s College in 2007.

Sir Christopher said: “I cannot express strongly enough how much I have valued the inspiration, encouragement, support and friendship that I have received at St John’s from students, staff, Fellows and alumni, and how important the intellectual and cultural environment that exists in this truly remarkable College has been for my scientific activities.”

Professor Tuomas Knowles, a co-founder of CMD and a Fellow of St John’s, said: “Sir Christopher's landmark discoveries over the past 30 years have truly transformed our understanding of misfolding diseases.

“His work has had enormous influence throughout the physical, biological and medical sciences, establishing new connections, and generating wide-reaching implications for molecular medicine. It is wonderful that such an eminent scientist and influential and inspiring leader has been recognised with this honour.”

Sir Christopher also paid tribute to his friends and family for their “unstinting support”.

He added: “On a personal note, I want to thank my friends, family and colleagues, and especially my wife, Mary, and children, Richard and William, for their fantastic encouragement throughout my life and career.”

Nobel prize winner and pioneer of electron microscopy Dr Richard Henderson was awarded the Companion of Honour.

Dr Henderson, an Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College and alumnus of Corpus Christi College where he is an Honorary Fellow, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 for his work developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.

He achieved a quantum leap in imaging techniques when his work allowing atomic structure determinations of many proteins that were previously impossible to obtain, provided important insights into biological functions and mechanisms that will enhance the study of diseases such as neurodegenerative and infections diseases and cancer.

Dr Henderson said: “It is a great honour to join such a distinguished group of people from all walks of life. My scientific mentors Max Perutz and César Milstein were earlier Companions of Honour, so it is a great delight to me to be able to continue in this tradition.”

Professor Mary Fowler, Master of Darwin College, said: "I am delighted that Darwin College Fellow Richard Henderson has been appointed a Companion of Honour - this and his Nobel Prize are richly deserved indeed. Richard's skill and his immense dedication benefit us all, bringing hope for much needed treatments for a wide range of diseases."

Many more alumni were honoured, with a CBE for television presenter and author Bamber Gascoigne (Magdalene) and knighthoods for historian and broadcaster Professor Simon Schama (Christ's) and Government barrister James Eadie (Magdalene). Dr Darrin Disley (Trinity Hall) was honoured with an OBE for services to business, enterprise and health while fellow Trinity Hall alumnus David Eyton was honoured with a CBE for services to engineering and energy.

Honorary Magdalene Fellow Sir Christopher Greenwood was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE) while Professor Jane Marshall (Murray Edwards) was given an Order of the British Empire for services to Education in Health Sciences. Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Professor Chris Husbands (Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam ̽��ֱ��) received a knighthood for services to higher education.

Thomas Adès (King's), received a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to music. Professor Nicholas Marston, Vice-Provost and Director of Studies in Music at King's College, said: "It is excellent to see artistic creativity in the UK being recognised in this fashion.

"King’s College can boast a remarkable line of composers across many generations; among contemporary figures, Tom Adès stands together with Judith Weir and George Benjamin as one of our many distinguished alumni whose musical and creative talents not only bring lustre to the College but – more importantly – enrich the lives of many people in this country and around the world.

"We congratulate him very warmly."

Leaders in fields from classics to Alzheimer’s research are recognised today in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

I am absolutely 100% delighted – especially to realise that Classical Civilisation is still taken seriously enough to be recognised in this way. That said, I expect a good few jokes about pantomime dames!

Professor Mary Beard

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Women at Cambridge: ̽��ֱ��Meaning of Success book launch

pbh25 — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:40:56 +0000

A major book launch held this week will highlight the lives and work of women at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��event will feature BBC newsreader Jane Hill interviewing women featured in the book as part of a panel discussion.

̽��ֱ��Meaning of Success profiles 26 women at Cambridge – from world-leading academics, to key administrative staff – and features contributions from another 100.

Professor Dame Athene Donald, Gender Equality Champion at ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says in the preface to the book: “As I read the stories these women reveal, I was moved and I was excited. Within an academic environment, too often the individual stories and voices are lost. Here we can reclaim a few of these and profit from what we hear.”

Women featured are from across the spectrum of staff within the ̽��ֱ�� and include masters of Colleges, senior scientists, office managers, an educational outreach officer and administrative staff.

Interviews with leading female figures within the ̽��ֱ�� include a section on Professor Mary Beard, famous for her popular TV programmes on Roman history.

Famed for her stance against Twitter trolls, the academic is equally strident in ideas of what defines success: “I find that people who are most talented in helping me to rethink my ideas often don’t measure up to the more usual marks of success.”

Working at the Judge Business School as a Research and Teaching Fellow, Dr Shima Barakat started her career as a construction engineer. Her approach to situations is revealed in the book: “My starting point is that I have the power to change something and I go from there.”

Her attitude helped her deal with many situations, including being the only women in a Cairo construction workforce of 400, but she details how there is still a need to do more than expect the individual to change to fit a situation: “Our systems are inconsistent and based on a masculine world view. We need to question them because they determine who gets recognised as successful.”

Each in-depth interview is accompanied by portrait photographs by Pari Naderi – images that will feature in a special Success: Women at Cambridge exhibition to be held next week at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��book will be launched at a special event on Wednesday, 5 March – at the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge.

Image: Dr Shima Barakat. Credit: ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Book launch highlights the lives and work of women at the ̽��ֱ��

Within an academic environment, too often the individual stories and voices are lost. Here we can reclaim a few of these and profit from what we hear.

Professor Dame Athene Donald, Gender Equality Champion at ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Additional information

More information about the book, including excerpts and profiles, can be found at the Women at Cambridge website: www.cam.ac.uk/womenatcambridge. ̽��ֱ��book will be made available view online and to purchase through Amazon.

̽��ֱ��book launch will be held on Wednesday, 5 March, 5.30pm – 7pm at West Road Concert Hall, 11 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP. ̽��ֱ��event will be hosted by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz.

To register go to: http://www.cam.ac.uk/women-at-cambridge/events/international-womens-day-... or email equality@admin.cam.ac.uk.

̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition of Pari Naderi’s photography will run from Tuesday, 11 March to Sunday, 16 March. Museum opening hours are: Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5.00pm / Sunday: 12noon - 5.00pm.

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Meet ̽��ֱ��Romans with Mary Beard

th288 — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:01:31 +0000

Mary Beard, Professor of Classics and Fellow of Newnham College, whose acclaimed programme Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town was broadcast in 2010, spent six weeks filming in Italy last summer.

By decoding epitaphs and piecing together the evidence from objects and archaeology, Professor Beard explores the stories of barmen, prostitutes, children, sailors, slaves and even gladiators.

In the first programme she rides the Via Appia, climbs to the top seats of the Colosseum, takes a boat to Rome’s famous Ostia port and takes us into the bowels of Monte Testaccio (‘broken pot mountain’).

She also meets Eurysaces, ex-slave and eccentric baker, who made a fortune out of the grain trade – building his tomb in the shape of a giant bread-oven; Baricha, Zabda and Achiba, three prisoners of war who went on to become Roman citizens; and Pupius Amicus, the purple-dye seller making imperial dye from murex shellfish imported from Tunisia.

In the second programme Professor Beard descends into the city streets to discover the dirt, crime, sex and slum conditions in the world’s first highrise city where most Romans lived in apartment blocks with little space, light or sanitation.

In the third programme she delves even deeper into ordinary Roman life by going behind the closed doors of the home, meeting an extraordinary cast of characters – drunken housewives, teenage brides, bullied children and runaway slaves – and paints a more dynamic, lusty picture of Roman life.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea behind the programme was to show that we really still can meet loads of very ordinary Romans face to face," said Professor Beard. "We may think of Rome as a marble city, full of posh blokes in togas. Sure there were some of those. But the funny, sardonic, touching voices of the men and women in the street still come across loud and clear. “Wine, women and bath” wrote one on his tombstone, “ruin our bodies – but they are what make life worth living!”

Episode One of Meet ̽��ֱ��Romans is on Tuesday 17 April on BBC2 at 9pm.

A three part series starting on BBC2 next Tuesday explores what life in Ancient Rome was really like for normal citizens living in the world’s first city of one million people.

̽��ֱ��idea behind the programme was to show that we really still can meet loads of very ordinary Romans face to face.

Professor Mary Beard

Rome with Mary Beard

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Past versus present in an age of progress: the Victorians

lw355 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:00:33 +0000

It was the age of industrialisation and political revolution, compulsory education and the dominance of the novel, the start of the postal service and the invention of the train, the excitement of evangelical Christianity and the critical challenge to the authorities of the past. Above all, it was an era that knew it was a time like no other, a time of radical progress and visionary reform. As the Victorians were forging remarkable economic and technological innovations, they were also obsessed with understanding their own history. In archaeology, geology, history, theology and evolutionary biology, how the past was understood was revolutionising the present – and shaping the future in which we now live.

For the past five years, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust has taken a fresh look at the development and impact of the competing views of the past in 19th-century Britain. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, a project carried out by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, has broken new ground in transcending the disciplinary boundaries that are themselves an intellectual legacy of the Victorians.

It has proved to be a wonderful experience for all concerned, and a model of how productive and exciting a long-term interdisciplinary project can be. Each member of the project has found their work developing and expanding its horizons, and the group has provided a remarkably supportive space for exploring the richness of Victorian culture. Historians of modern Britain (Professor Peter Mandler) have been brought together with historians of science (Professor Jim Secord), and classicists (Professors Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill) with experts in literary criticism (Professor Clare Pettitt), along with eight postdoctoral fellows and three graduate students, to explore the full range of the Victorian experience, representation and comprehension of the past.

Central to the group’s activities was the weekly meeting where we read and discussed Victorian material, secondary sources and our own research in progress. These were generous but heated debates, where each member had something different to bring to the table. ̽��ֱ��varied ranges of knowledge and approaches were thrashed out, sometimes painfully. These led to regular workshops with invited guests from around the world, which in turn produced editions of journals and other publications (see below for the two most recent books).

Our projects looked at major defining questions of Victorian culture that can be properly treated only by a multidisciplinary team: from what the Victorians learned in school and university, to the poetry or novels they wrote; from how the new technologies of archaeology transformed biblical scholarship, to how imperial administrators changed policies from conquering and looting to ruling and maintenance of national cultural heritage; and from explorations of contemporary political violence to explorations of the influence of the ancient world on contemporary political idealism.

̽��ֱ��project has left a mark in the field of Victorian studies. It has raised the profile of hitherto neglected bodies of knowledge which the Victorians took for granted but which we do not, largely because of our different disciplinary map. We have gained a new appreciation of the paramount significance for the Victorian imagination of classical languages and archaeology, of Egypt and the Far East, of geology and the Biblical texts.

Although the project inevitably calls itself by the buzzword ‘interdisciplinary’, we were actually studying a period when the disciplines were just beginning to be formed and professionalised. In effect, much of the work was not so much interdisciplinary, as learning to reach back behind the disciplines to different regimes and organisations of knowledge. In exploring the Victorian attitudes to the past, we were exploring how the current scholarly map was formed. In investigating a Victorian sense of heritage, we were discovering the intellectual heritage that all modern academics share.

Interdisciplinary research has to be the answer when it comes to understanding the Victorians, writes Professor Simon Goldhill, one of the researchers involved in a £1.2 million project on Victorian Britain that is reaching the end of its five-year programme.

Professor Simon Goldhill

Dr Sadiah Qureshi

From Illustrated London News, September 16, 1845

Victorian appetites

A fascination for imported Zulus and the living curiosities of the modern world, an obsession with the beauty and perfection of ancient Greece and Rome – two very different sides of Victorian appetites, and the subject of recently published books by members of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

In 1853, 13 Zulus were brought and displayed as “the savages at Hyde Park Corner” (where Dickens saw them), to perform dances, rituals and songs for a public of gazing English men and women. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial differences, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work and the empire.

In the recently published Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dr Sadiah Qureshi provides the first substantial overview of the Victorian penchant for exhibiting live human beings, especially those from exotic foreign climes.

̽��ֱ��book is full of startling stories and stunning images, but what makes it so interesting and important is its revelation of how science and popular culture developed hand in hand where race, anthropology and geography are concerned. We are still inheriting the impact of the Victorian fascination with race, and this book reveals that history with vibrant and incisive insight.

If Dr Sadiah Qureshi explores how the Victorians looked at the exotic, disturbing and denigrated ‘others’ of Victorian thinking – the natives, the savages, the racially inferior – Professor Simon Goldhill looks at the Victorians’ projection of an ideal, glorious origin for Western culture in classical antiquity. Just as the Victorians stared with horrified distance at “the savages”, so they wondered at the perfection of Greek bodies, the order of the Roman Empire, the beauty and profundity of classical poetry.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity demonstrates how classics made up the furniture of the mind for Victorians, educated, as they were, in Greek and Latin and surrounded by classical imagery.

But, more significantly, this book also shows how classics became the way of enacting the most pressing cultural anxieties of the period. Whether it was Oscar Wilde and his chums looking back to Greece for sexual liberation, or painters turning to classical nudity to ground their aesthetic vision, or historians and novelists arguing the politics of democracy or the role of the early church, it was always a detour through the ideal of classical antiquity that framed their thinking.

̽��ֱ��Victorians prided themselves, anxiously, on being an age of progress, but progress was often judged and understood according to the ideal model of the ancient past – the Greece, as Nietzsche paradigmatically put it, which is the only place where we are truly at home.

These newly published books show how complex a business Victorian self-definition and self-understanding is: between public shows and grand opera, anthropology and history, religion and novels, science and painting, an image of what Western culture is, and should be, was being forged – and we are all still the heirs of this work of historical self-consciousness. Both books are the product of many years of research – and both have been fundamentally affected by their gestation within the interdisciplinary milieu of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011) by Dr Sadiah Qureshi is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011) by Professor Simon Goldhill is published by Princeton ̽��ֱ�� Press

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Yes

Academics to join British Academy Fellowship

bjb42 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election is an acknowledgment of "academic distinction" and is granted annually to only a small number of scholars in any field.

This year's list includes eight Cambridge academics. ̽��ֱ��newly appointed Fellows are as follows:

Professor David Abulafia has been a Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge since 2000 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College since 1974. He has a particular interest in the economic, social and political history of southern Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and has written a wide variety of publications on the history and development of the Mediterranean lands.

Professor Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and her blog, 'A Don's Life' appears in ̽��ֱ��Times as a regular column. She has written widely on Classical culture and its reception in the modern world, and her latest book, 'Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town' is soon to be adapted into a BBC series.

Professor Christopher Clark is a Professor of Modern European History and a Fellow at St Catharine's College. Born and educated in Australia, Clark became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2007. His research interests include the history of 19th century Germany and continental Europe, but his current work focuses on the outbreak of war in 1914 and political change across Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

Dr Alan Baker was elected in 1970 as the first ever teaching Fellow of Geography at Emmanuel College and is now a Life Fellow. From 2001 until this year, Dr Baker was a Cambridge City Councillor and chaired its Planning Committee for seven years.

His research focuses upon the social, economic and cultural geography of 19th century France. In 1997 the French government recognised his "services to French culture" through awarding the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Deborah Howard is Professor of Architectural History and a Fellow of St John's College. Her research interests include the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. She recently co-ordinated a major research project on 'Architecture and Music in Renaissance Venice'.

Professor Juliet Mitchell is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Department of Human Geography. Her research looks at gender difference from a psychoanalytic and social history perspective and examines the sibling relationship in different contexts.

Dr Karalyn Patterson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She is currently studying the effects that brain disease and damage have upon adult language and memory. She has published her findings in a variety of scientific journals.

Dr Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Master of Sidney Sussex College and will be Professor in the Faculty of Classics from October 2010. He is a Roman social and cultural historian with a particular interest in Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was the Director of the British School at Rome from 1995 until 2009, and was made an OBE in the New Year's Honours for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations.

On hearing of her election, Professor Mary Beard said: "I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same."

"We Classicists know what a world without Humanities is - it's the Dark Ages. My job, and all the more now, is not just to resist the forces of darkness, but to make clear why the Humanities are not an optional extra for times of plenty, but central to everything we, as a culture, do."

̽��ֱ��scholars will become the newest members of the British Academy which currently consists of over 1,000 academics. ̽��ֱ��British Academy not only recognises academic achievement, but also helps fund national and international research and organises a wide-ranging programme of public events.

̽��ֱ��British Academy has today announced the scholars elected for this year&rsquo;s Fellowships in recognition of their contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same.

Professor Mary Beard

Sir Cam

Senate House

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Re-interpreting Greece and Rome at ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:00:11 +0000

Scholars from ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum and Faculty of Classics have won a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to undertake research that will underpin the re-display of the Museum’s Greek and Roman collections. ̽��ֱ��three-year project grant funds a full-time research assistant and aims to bring university-based research in classical art and archaeology into conversation with museum-based display practices.

Traditional museum displays of Greek and Roman material tend to privilege either a chronological or a thematic approach. ̽��ֱ��former offers a stylistic history of Greek and Roman art that plays down the original context and nature of the objects, while the latter presents these objects as though transparent evidence for ‘daily life’. Both leave out of the picture the role of collectors in shaping museum collections.

Recent research has exposed the inadequacy of seeing the history of art purely in terms of stylistic progression, and has improved our understanding of the importance of changing technology, the complexities of workshop practices, and the role of ancient markets in influencing production. ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam re-display offers an opportunity to re-assess the collections both in the light of these advances and as collections.

‘ ̽��ֱ��project will put people back into the history of art and provide an important opportunity to integrate ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam’s collections into the study of classics in Cambridge,’ explained Dr Lucilla Burn, Keeper of Antiquities and Principal Investigator. ‘It will also provide the Faculty with both the opportunity to engage with actual objects and a broader public forum in which to share and transfer their knowledge and expertise,’ added Professor Robin Osborne who, with Dr Caroline Vout and Professor Mary Beard, represents the Faculty of Classics component of the project.

̽��ֱ��research will be disseminated to the public in an online public-access catalogue and new web pages for "virtual" visitors. Talks, workshops and family activities drawing on the research will also be an important part of the Museum’s education provision for children and adults.

For more information, please contact ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk).

Recent funding will enable collaboration between classicists and museum curators, and shape a major re-display of Greek and Roman art and archaeology.

̽��ֱ��project will put people back into the history of art and provide an important opportunity to integrate ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam’s collections into the study of classics in Cambridge,

Lucilla Burn

Tasitch from Flickr

Roman marbles

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Yes