Women in Power: Professor Mary Beard Gives the Alice Bacon Lecture 2022

The renowned scholar, Professor Mary Beard, is to give the 2022 Alice Bacon Lecture at the University of Leeds on Thursday 27th October. The celebrated Professor of Classics will be delivering the lecture on the theme ‘Women in Power’.

Often described as Britain's best-known classicist, Professor Beard is a regular on television and radio. Meet the Romans with Mary Beard and Inside Culture are among her best-known television series. She is also the author of several books including Women & Power, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, and the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town.

On giving the 2022 lecture, Professor Beard has said: “I'm very pleased to be joining what is fast becoming a great tradition of women speakers and doers - right back to Alice Bacon."

For more details and tickets to this free, public lecture, see here.

About the Lecture Series

The public lecture is held annually and celebrates the achievements of pioneering women and is hosted by the University of Leeds’ Centre for Democratic Politics. It is named for the Leeds Labour MP who led a crusade to improve the education of working-class girls and boys. Alice Bacon was elected to represent Leeds North East in 1945 and served her city constituents continuously until her retirement a quarter of a century later, when she took up a seat in the House of Lords as a Baroness. Leeds did not return another woman to the Commons until the election in 2010 of Leeds West MP and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who is also Baroness Bacon’s biographer.

The inaugural lecture was given in 2018 by Harriet Harman – the House of Commons’ longest continuously serving female MP – followed in 2019 by Baroness Hale of Richmond, who was the first female President of the Supreme Court and the country’s most senior judge until her retirement from the role in December that year. After a break in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the series returned in 2021 with Baroness Doreen Lawrence, who spoke about women in the public eye and her personal journey. Baroness Lawrence came to prominence following the death of her son Stephen, a black British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in Southeast London in 1993.