The UOC to award feminist and historian Mary Beard an honorary doctorate

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is one of Britain’s best known classicists thanks to her regular media appearances and the work she has done to make the classics more accessible; she has been able to bring ancient Rome to life by portraying its culture through the eyes of the people of the time. In recognition of her outstanding academic career, which has seen her become one of the leading specialists in the history of ancient Rome, she is to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the UOC at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 30 October in Barcelona City Council's Saló de Cent. The ceremony, which you can follow live via the #honoriscausaUOC hashtag, will also be attended by Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona.

She is a committed feminist and her book Women & Power: A Manifesto (Profile Books, 2017) highlights history's treatment of women and showcases leading women from throughout history, from Greek goddess Athena and Penelope from Homer's The Odyssey to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. It also includes personal reflections on the sexism and gender-based harassment she has suffered on social media. Her Twitter account, with over 235,000 followers, receives thousands of insulting tweets, many of which are sexist, but she doesn’t just respond to the haters, she takes them on. The New Yorker has even gone as far as to call her The Troll Slayer.

She was a lecturer at King's College London from 1979 to 1983, and then became a fellow of the University of Cambridge’s Newnham College and a lecturer, from 1984 to 1999, in the Faculty of Classics, where at times she was the only female member of staff. She was a reader from 1999 to 2004, before being named Professor of Classics in 2004. She was also chair of the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters at the British School at Rome from 2002 to 2006, and Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008-2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she delivered a series of lectures on "Roman Laughter".

She has produced more than fifteen works on a range of classical subjects, including Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2008), which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2009 and was later made into a documentary film in 2010 by the BBC. She also makes frequent appearances in the media. She has been editor of the "Classics" section of The Times Literary Supplement since 1992, where she writes her blog, A Don's Life. She also regularly takes part in the BBC Radio 4 programme A Point of View.

In recognition of her outstanding professional career, she has been awarded not only the Wolfson History Prize in 2009 and an OBE in 2013, but she has also received the University of Oxford's Bodley Medal and the Princess of Asturias Award in Social Sciences in 2016. Two universities have awarded her an honorary doctorate: Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2017 and the Netherlands' Radboud University in 2018.