academia – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Averil Cameron, who died earlier this month, was one of the most transformative figures in the study of the ancient world. Tributes have been paid across multiple publications and her obituary has appeared this week in both The Times and The Guardian.

Not only did Cameron’s scholarship reshape how we understand Byzantium, her very presence in academia was quite remarkable at the time. Born into a modest family in Leek in Staffordshire, the daughter of two factory workers, she did not inherit the cultural capital that usually smoothed the way into Classics at Britain’s most prestigious universities. But Cameron’s parents were supportive and valued education, and she was entered for the 11+ examinations and gained a place at the local grammar school. More than one teacher seems to have spotted her potential and her parents were encouraged by the school to consider preparing her for university. At a time when academia still felt like a closed shop run by the male elite, particularly in fields such as Classics, Cameron found her way in not through entitlement but through sheer intellectual excellence. Mary Beard, a friend of Cameron’s as well as a colleague in the field, has paid tribute to her and credits Cameron’s influence on her own access to the field: her first academic position was granted to her by Cameron.

At a time when women were still wildly under-represented in senior academic roles, indeed a world in which women were regularly taken off academic shortlists to make way for men, Cameron rose to positions of leadership. To give you an idea of the world we are talking about, she was appointed as an assistant lecturer at King’s College, London in the mid 1960s, when the faculty dining room did not admit women. She maintained a steady focus on the work itself rather than the politics and indeed remarked in 2024 that she felt she had published too much, citing an inability to say “no” to any publishing opportunity that came her way. Cameron’s copious output has helped to normalise the centrality of women in spaces and on shelves where their presence had once been the exception. In an era when conversations about access and indeed the very purpose of higher education continue to evolve, Cameron’s contribution offers a truly inspirational model. Furthermore, she was not interested in guarding disciplinary boundaries, but drew on history, theology, literature and cultural studies, long before such an interdisciplinary approach became the norm. In doing so, she helped to broaden the scope of what it meant to study the ancient world, inviting others to see connections that had previously been overlooked.

Cameron’s perspective as a new and fresh pair of eyes on the scene would prove to be one of her strengths as an academe. Rather than simply reproducing the traditional narratives or, as Peter Brown put it, the “debased images of Byzantium” that she inherited, she questioned them. Cameron approached the late antique and Byzantine worlds not as declining remnants of classical greatness (the general approach taken by scholars since Gibbon’s definitive Decline and Fall), but as vibrant, evolving cultures that defined the world to follow. This shift in perspective helped to reshape entire fields of study: where earlier scholars had often dismissed Byzantium as a derivative world in decline, Cameron — along with Peter Brown and a handful of others — helped to reveal its richness and complexity as well as its centrality to understanding the evolution from antiquity to the medieval world. She had a profound influence on me and helped to foster what would become my research focus. The publication of two of her works, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity and The Later Roman Empire, both in around 1993, coincided exactly with my first exposure to this period during my second year of study at university. The rest, as they say, is history.

This tribute would not be complete and I would not be any kind of (albeit ex) academe were I not to ensure that my acknowledgement of Cameron’s academic achievements reflect on me in some way. So here we go. Well, I only met her once, when she interviewed me for a potential place to do a Master’s degree at King’s College, London, when I was still considering which path to take and where to study after my first degree. It was the toughest interview I have ever had: way, way more difficult than the viva I had to undergo to be awarded my PhD, which was barely more than a nice chat. Cameron was absolutely brutal. She considered my record to date with languages woefully inadequate and told me that as things stood I would be ill-equipped to cope with research. She advised me to change the selections I had tentatively made for the next year and focus on building up my language skills if I wanted to stand any kind of chance at furthering my career in academia. I came away pretty upset but with the sneaking and uncomfortable feeling that she was right. In the end, I took her advice and I opted for further training in both Latin and Greek. To this day, I am immensely grateful to her that she told me how things were, not how I would have wanted them to be. Not only was she right about my need for further training, she was proved more and more right the further I travelled down that path. By the time I was half way through my PhD I realised that not only were my Latin and Greek barely sufficient for work at the level demanded, I was also going to struggle due to my lack of French and German; a significant proportion of the scholarship in Classics is published in those languages, which nobody tells you until you get a considerable way down the rabbit hole. Long story short, languages (both ancient and modern) are momumentally important if you’re going to study Classics with any level of seriousness. Aspiring scholars, take heed.

Cameron’s death leaves a gap that will be felt across many fields, but her influence endures in the questions scholars continue to ask themselves, in the frameworks that they use and in the more enlightened vision of academia that she helped to advance. Her journey from modest beginnings to the forefront of intellectual life was not just a personal triumph; it serves as a reminder of what becomes possible when talent is allowed to flourish. Her contribution to scholarship is simply immense.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gregg Wallace’s video was the most explosive thing to happen on social media this week, but you would be wrong.

Picture the scene: a young, female academic at Cambridge shares a happy picture of herself, smiling and clutching her freshly-acknowledged PhD thesis in English literature. Ally Louks, now Dr Ally Louks, probably thought that her message of celebration that she was “PhDone” would be liked by a few and ignored by the majority. Yet her post at the time of writing has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and Ally has received torrents of abuse, some of which beggars belief. The whole storm has sparked outraged discussion on all sides – most of it thoroughly ignorant – about what a PhD is or should be.

Here’s the thing, for those of you that haven’t been there. A PhD is like going potholing: you wriggle down into some difficult spaces and explore the subterrain. Nobody will ever know those particular underground passages better than you, because nobody else is ever likely to go there or, indeed, even want to go there. The reason you’re awarded the PhD is because you have traversed new terrain and – in the judgement of the potholing community – you are the first to do so, or you have uncovered a sufficient number of nooks and crannies that previous potholers did not comment upon. Most of the time, you don’t find an underground palace, a glistening river of stalactites or a dazzling crystal chamber: you simply wriggle your way back up to the surface and get on with your life. Your thesis will sit on the shelf of whichever institution recognised it and – if you’re lucky – it will be consulted by a tiny handful of niche-hole specialists over the next few decades, the number of which you could count on one hand.

Personally, I blame Stephen Hawking. During his doctorate, he hit upon a leap of understanding so brilliant that it changed the direction of theoretical physics forever. Most of us don’t manage that. This does not mean that our PhDs are not worthy of the title: it simply means that most of us are – demonstrably – not a genius like Hawking. There is a reason why Hawking has been laid to rest between Newton and Dawin: he is right up there with those two when it comes to the significance of his contribution to his field. Yet many people seem to assume that Hawking is an example of what is expected of a PhD candidate – a particularly famous example, perhaps, but an example nonetheless. In reality, most research is utterly banal and unimportant: it’s not going to shake up our understanding of the fabric of the universe.

Louks’ PhD sounds – to me – rather fun. Okay, I’m one of those wish-washy artsy types that got a PhD in Classics, not theoretical physics, but I reckon her thesis “Olfactory ethics: the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose” sounds like a more stimulating read than a huge number of PhDs that have passed under my nose over the years (pun intended). In response to the unexpected interest in her work, Louks shared her abstract, which only further made my nostrils twitch. Her thesis explores “how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse – the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates – in structuring our social world.” Her work looks at various authors and explores how smell is used in description to delineate class, social status and other social strata. I mean … fine? No? Quite why a certain type of Science Lad on the internet decided that this was a completely unacceptable thesis baffles me. Apparently, there is a certain type of aggressively practical chap, who believes that exploring how things are represented in literature and how that literature has in turn helped to shape our world is utterly unworthy. Well, more fool them. They should read some literature. I suggest they start with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, a modern classic that is quite literally a novel about smell.

I’ll confess that the whole thing has left me feeling quite jumpy about my own thesis, which in 1999 was welcomed as an acceptable contribution to my very narrow, very obscure corner of the underground caves. Once I had seen the reaction to Louks’ abstract I decided to re-read my own. Having done so, I concluded not only that it would sound utterly barking to the rest of the world, it sounded utterly barking to me! This was a field in which I was immersed at the time but have read nothing about since I walked out of the room in which my viva took place.

The viva itself is something that most people do not really understand and is difficult to explain. It is not an examination. Short for viva voce, which is Latin for “with the living voice”, the viva is there in principle for the PhD candidate to demonstrate that they are the author of their own work. In practice, it is also an opportunity for the examiners to quiz the candidate and explore their hypothesis further. The examiners may have questions and it is common for them to advise corrections and amendments; often, the examiners make the passing of the thesis conditional on these amendments. Best case scenario (and one enjoyed by Ally Louks), the examiners pass your thesis with nothing more than a few pencil annotations, none of which require attention for the thesis to be accepted. Worst case scenario, they say that your thesis is a load of old hooey and that you should not – under any circumstances – re-submit it, corrected or otherwise.

While the worst-case scenario is rare and indicates a profound failure on the part of the candidate’s supervisor, who never should have allowed the submission, it does happen on rare occasions. The last time I saw one of my old lecturers from my university days, he reported being fresh from a viva on which he had acted as an external examiner and had failed the thesis. This happens so rarely that I was agog. Having been so long out of the world of academia, it is impossible for me to express in simple terms the intellectual complexities that he explained were the reasons behind his decision, so I shall have to quote him directly: apologies if the language is too academic for you to follow. “Basically, it was b*****ks,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was kind of brilliant b*****ks: but it was b*****ks nevertheless.” That poor candidate. I ached for him. I also found myself recalling the gut-wrenching moment during which Naomi Wolf’s PhD thesis was exposed as fundamentally flawed by Matthew Sweet, live on Radio 3. If you’ve never listened to the relevant part of the interview, I highly recommend it: it is – especially for those of us who have submitted a thesis for judgement in the past – the most toe-curling listen imaginable. Wolf’s entire thesis appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of a legal term, which Sweet discovered simply by looking it up on The Old Bailey’s website. Wolf’s thesis had been passed at Trinity College, Cambridge, an institution that would be hard to beat in terms of intellectual clout and reputation, so quite how this happened is mind-boggling and shameful.

The reaction to Souks’ thesis does, I suspect, have a great deal to do with the increasing suspicion with which academia is viewed, and in many ways I am not unsympathetic to people’s disquiet. There is, without question, a good deal of nonsense (or b*****ks, to use the technical term) talked in a lot of fields, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Yet the vitriol with which Souks was criticised has nothing to do with this. Her abstract, to anyone with even a grudging respect for the field of English literature, makes intellectual sense. No, the roasting of Souks and her work betrays a profound and depressing ignorance as well as a nasty dose of good old-fashioned cruelty. Before people decide that an entire field of study is unworthy of merit, they should maybe ask themselves whether there is even the tiniest possibility that they perhaps don’t know enough about it before they pounce. One can but hope that these people who value their rationality so much will next time run a more scientific test, rather than dunking the witch to see whether she floats.

Tag: academia

Byzantine Matters – a tribute to Averil Cameron