Mary Beard

Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL (born 1 January 1955) is an English scholar of 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 a 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." The New Yorker characterizes her as "learned but accessible."

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 partly just the prospect of earning some pocket money.

At 18, she sat the then-compulsory entrance exam and interviewed 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 per tradition, her BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. She remained at Cambridge for her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) 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.

Beard married Robin Cormack, a classicist and art historian, in 1985. Their daughter Zoe is an anthropologist and historian based at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Oxford. Their son Raphael Cormack is an author, editor, and translator specializing in Arabic Cultural History and Literature. In 2000, Beard revealed in an essay for the London Review of Books reviewing a book on rape that she, too, had been raped in 1978.

Her blog, A Don's Life, gets about 40,000 hits a day, according to The Independent (2013). Beard is set to retire in 2022 and started a scholarship as a "retirement present" worth £80,000 in order to support two disadvantaged students' classical studies at Cambridge.