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.
