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A black and white picture of a mature white woman with white hair in a cartoon frame sitting on a pile of books, and propped up with a Roman column.

Mary Beard

Moderated by Bri Lee

10 March 2024

In the Concert Hall

Sydney Opera House Presents

Talks and Ideas

In theatre and livestreamed

Join the world-famous classics scholar and feminist icon Mary Beard for this captivating conversation on her first-ever visit to Australia.

Author of countless books, star of dozens of television shows, and perhaps the one woman who thinks about the Roman Empire more than any man on TikTok, Beard gets to the nitty gritty of misogyny and power from the ancient world to today.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

Mary Beard

a feminist for the ages

For the first time, Sydney audiences will hear directly from Cambridge Professor Emerita Dame Mary Beard in an event that delves into the broad range of her career - from the ruins of ancient Rome to the trenches of Twitter. No one is better equipped to tell us about how power is skewed along gender lines than Mary Beard, whose latest book, Emperor of Rome, gives us a nuanced understanding of sex, class, race, and politics in the ancient world, and whose astute observations of modern political power have shone a light on the remarkably persistent patterns of patriarchy today. 

Presented by Sydney Opera House

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