Professor Edith Hall and Professor Andy Wood named new British Academy Fellows

The British Academy elects up to 52 new UK-based scholars each year to its fellowship who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences.

A classical scholar

Professor Edith Hall has published more than thirty books on many aspects of ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history and on the continuing presence of the ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds in more recent times since the Renaissance.

She has written widely on ethnicity, gender and social class in ancient thought and their subsequent uses and abuses, for example in European and North American controversies over slavery and imperialism.

In 2017, she was made Leadership Fellow on the AHRC project and campaign Advocating Classics Education, which seeks to make the study of Classical Civilisation and Ancient History more widely available in the State Secondary Sector.

She has recently been awarded an ERC grant and also a Leverhulme Trust research grant for an allied project, which will be honoured by UKRI.

Her election as a Fellow of The British Academy recognises her outstanding contribution in Classics and Ancient History.

Prominent Historian

Professor Andy Wood has written extensively on issues such as popular politics, rebellion, neighbourhood, customary law, memory, folklore, gender, social relations, mining communities and local and regional history.

His fourth book, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2013) won the American Historical Association’s Leo Gershoy Award.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has held Fellowships at our Institute for Advanced Studies alongside the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

He is currently working on his sixth book, entitled Letters of Blood and Fire: Authority, Resistance and Social Order in England, 1500-1640.

Professor Andy Wood’s internationally distinguished contributions to the field of History has been honoured with his election as a Fellow of The British Academy.

Find out more

• Learn more about the work of Professor Edith Hall and Professor Andy Wood.
• Check out our Department of History and Department of Classics and Ancient History.
• Interested in studying at Durham? Explore our undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

About our Department of Classics and Ancient History

One of the largest in the UK, the Classics and Ancient History Department ranks 13th in the 2022 QS World University Rankings by subject and with score of 85 for employer reputation graduates have gone on to careers in computing, civil service, gold dealing, insurance, journalism, law, accountancy, public relations and the theatre.

We’re confident that our work brings the relevance and importance of Classics to a wider audience and our engagement with partners outside academia demonstrates the continued impact of Classics on people’s lives today.

Feeling inspired? Visit our Classics and Ancient History webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

About our Department of History

Set within the magnificent location of Durham’s World Heritage Site, the Department of History at Durham has established itself firmly as one of the top three in the UK.

Our research and teaching extend from late antiquity and the Middle Ages to contemporary history; from the British Isles and continental Europe to the USA, Africa and East Asia; and across social, cultural, gender, visual, scientific, political and economic history.

Feeling inspired? Visit our History webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.