Susanna Braund, CNERS faculty member and an accomplished scholar in the field of Latin literature and translation, was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities and to the Royal Society of Canada. She was also the recipient of UBC Killam Research Prize in 2018/19.
Dr. Braund reflects on what this recognition means to her and the field of Classics:
“We humanities scholars get used to toiling away on our own in our specialist fields, knowing that only a handful of people in the world understand what we are trying to achieve. This makes recognition of achievements by local and national bodies especially gratifying. I have been blessed this year to receive a UBC Killam Research Prize and to be elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities and to the Royal Society of Canada. The Australian Award recognises my promotion of Australian scholarship in Classics. I have fostered connections with Australia since the 1990s, undertaking a lecture tour (1998), visiting as a keynote speaker (2007), supporting the Pacific Rim Latin Seminar (1999, 2008, 2016 and 2017), serving as External examiner for advanced degrees (2000 and 2005) and facilitating visits by Australian students and scholars to UK, USA and Canada (1997 onwards). Becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada is the greatest honour a Canadian academic can aspire to. At a time when the RSC is modernizing itself and making itself more welcome to women and minorities, it is gratifying that there is still a place for work in the field of Classics, a field inevitably associated with elitism and colonialism. I hope that my election shows that issues raised by the reception of Greco-Roman culture intersect profoundly with current concerns about access to knowledge and socio-political and economic power structures. These are among the issues I discuss in my study for Cambridge University Press of the translation history of Virgil from the eleventh century to the present day.”
