feminist historian takes the Princess of Asturias – Milenio.com

Mary Beard (1955), British historian and professor at the University of Cambridge, received the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences 2016.

Disclosing privacy of Rome, the historian has documented the classic through books like Pompeii, history and legend of a city world. He was also responsible for conducting various programs for the BBC. The most recent of them was Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit , which aired in April . His popularity, however, beyond the borders of academics.

In 2012, Mary Beard led Meet the romans series that showed how violence in times of Classical Rome keeps striking similarities with today. A box, Beard has never had qualms about appearing with unkempt hair and a revolt after all, was his knowledge what was difundiendo-. From youth dedicated to revealing the secrets of classical ancestors, it has no time to repair banalities Perhaps never before has a historical disclosure program had aroused so much controversy. Unusual way, was not the content of the episodes which ignited the social networks -and even some media-, but its appearance.

The humiliations he suffered were as absurd as hurtful, protected by the coward trench representing the screen, users of social networks referred to her with vicious insults. Even more distressing were the comments that other media launched with the same macho air.

With the impetus of Roman soldier, Beard took those insults with an enviable serenity. He responded with quiet humor and a communicator of The Daily Telegraph that had compared his program with a reality show of people desperate to find a partner. He also spoke with the mother of a boy of 20 who wrote a tweet in which he referred to it as “stinking whore” and added that “disgusting her vagina.” He compiled each of their personal conversations with people who insulted her in a series of chronicles published in his blog. Subsequently transformed those experiences in a text that tells the silence imposed on women, who read in the British Museum.

Today, Mary Beard received the Princess of Asturias Prize with the same simplicity that characterizes it. The prize, awarded “for outstanding contribution to the study of culture, politics and society of Greco-Roman antiquity”, returns to the fore his academic work. However, Beard does not deny his activism or plans to leave, it ensures that could not understand “what would be a woman without being a feminist.”