page_title: Mary Beard (classicist)
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Beard (classicist) / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, while filming in Rome, Italy. Español: Mary Beard, profesora de estudios clásicos en la Universidad de Cambridge, filmando en la ciudad de Roma, Italia.
context_page_description: Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA is an English scholar of Ancient Roman civilisation. The New Yorker characterises her as "learned but accessible".
  She is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. She 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."
  Beard was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 New Year Honours and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to the study of classical
  civilisations.
context_section_description: Beard married Robin Cormack, a classicist and art historian, in 1985. Their daughter Zoe is an historian of South Sudan and their son Raphael is a scholar of Egyptian 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).
  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." For the 12 December 2019 general election, she was a proposer for the successful Cambridge Labour candidate Daniel Zeichner. 
  In 2019, Beard appeared in an episode of The Grand Tour having dinner with host James May in an effort to get his car photographed by Paparazzi.
caption: Beard filming in Rome, 2012
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