Averil Cameron

Dame Averil Millicent Cameron

Cameron was born on 8 February 1940 in Leek, Staffordshire. She was the only child of working-class parents, Tom Roy Sutton and Millicent (née Drew) Sutton.^[4][5] She read literae humaniores at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was awarded the Edwards Scholarship in 1960 and the Rosa Hovey Scholarship in 1962.^[6]

From 1962 to 1980, she was married to

In 1994 she was elected Warden of Keble College, Oxford, where she served as Chair of the Conference of Colleges and as Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Chair of Committees relating to the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library (then the Sackler Library), to the St Cross Building, to Honorary Degrees, Select Preachers, to the Bampton Lectures and to the Wainwright Fund, and was a member of the committee on conflict of interest.^{[citation needed]}

Cameron was Editor of the

Cameron has also acted as the President of academic societies including: the Ecclesiastical History Society (2005–2006),[7] the Council for British Research in the Levant,^[8] and the International Federation of Associations of Classical Studies (2009–2014).^[8] In 2018, she became President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (2018–2023).^[9]

Work

Cameron's early articles explored early Byzantine and medieval writers including Agathias, Corippus, Procopius, and Gregory of Tours from literary and historical perspectives. Her early monographs, Agathias (1970) and Procopius and the Sixth Century (1985) were accompanied by a number of influential edited collections, including Images of Women in Antiquity, edited jointly with Amélie Kuhrt (1983), and History as Text (1989). Her work Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (1990) originated as the Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley. With this work Cameron sparked a scholarly conversation about "the power of discourse in society" in later antiquity, seeking to understand "how Christianity was able to develop a totalizing discourse'" (the phrase itself is borrowed from the work of Michel Foucault).^[10]

Honours

Cameron holds

She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1999 and a Dame Commander (DBE) in 2006.^{[13] [14]}

Cameron is a Fellow of the

In 2007, a Festschrift edited by Hagit Amirav and Bas ter Haar Romeny, From Rome to Constantinople: Studies in Honour of Averil Cameron (Leuven: Peeters), was published in Cameron's honour. In 2020, Cameron was awarded the British Academy Kenyon Medal for her lifetime contribution to Byzantine Studies.^[18][19] The medal was awarded for the first time in 1957. Cameron is the second woman to receive the award, after Joyce Reynolds (2017).^[18]

Selected bibliography

Books and edited volumes

• ISBN 0-19-814352-4
• Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. with Amélie Kuhrt (London: Duckworth, 1983, rev. 1993),
• ISBN 0-7156-1510-7
• History as Text, ed. (London: Duckworth, 1989)
• The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire, ed. with Susan Walker (London: 1989)
• Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (
  ISBN 0-520-07160-3
• The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Sources, ed. with Lawrence I. Conrad (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992)
• The Later Roman Empire, AD 284-430 (
  ISBN 0-00-686172-5
• The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East II: Land Use and Settlement Patterns, ed. with G.R.D. King (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994)
• The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies, ed. (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995)
• The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395-700 (
  ISBN 0-415-01420-4
  ; rev/ and expanded ed. (London: Routledge, 2012)
• Images of Women in Antiquity (rev. ed., Routledge 1993),
  ISBN 0-415-09095-4
  (ed. with Amélie Kuhrt)
• Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. and commentary, with S.G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)
• Fifty Years of Prosopography, ed., Publications of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
• The Cambridge Ancient History
  • Vol. 12: The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337 (
    ISBN 0-521-30199-8
    (2nd ed., ed. with Alan K. Bowman and Peter Garnsey)
  • Vol. 13: The Late Empire, AD 337-425 (Cambridge University Press 1998),
    ISBN 0-521-30200-5
    (ed. with Peter Garnsey)
  • Vol. 14: Late Antiquity: Empires and Successors, AD 425-600 (Cambridge University Press 2000),
    ISBN 0-521-32591-9 (ed. with Bryan Ward-Perkins
    and Michael Whitby)
• Doctrine and Debate in Eastern Christianity, 300-1500, ed. with Robert Hoyland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)
• Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam, The Formation of the Islamic World, ed. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)
• The Byzantines (
  ISBN 0-631-20262-5
• Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA:: Ashgate Harvard University Press, 2014)
• Byzantine Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)
• Arguing it Out: Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium (Central European University Press, 2016)
• Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium, ed. with Niels Gaul (Milton Park: Routledge, 2017)
• Byzantine Christianity (London: SPCK, 2017).
• From the Later Roman Empire to Late Antiquity and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2023)