Distinguished Classicist elected to the Academia Europaea

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

Congratulations to Professor Eleanor Dickey, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Academia Europaea.

The Academia Europaea is the European-Union equivalent of the British Academy and the Royal Society, an international learned society composed of leading experts in the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law. It was founded in 1988 and currently has c. 3000 members, drawn from across the whole European continent. Only 24 of these are UK Classicists, so Professor Dickey joins a select group.

This honour follows closely upon Professor Dickey's election last month to the British Academy but is wholly independent of it, as each election was based on a lengthy peer-review process. The rare double honour is testimony to Professor Dickey's standing in the international scholarly community as well as in the UK.

Eleanor Dickey was educated at Bryn Mawr College in America and Merton College Oxford. She has published more than eighty scholarly works, including four monographs, and in December will produce a fifth, The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana II. This work provides the first-ever English translation of one of the Western world's oldest surviving children's books, a textbook written for language learners during the Roman Empire.

The textbook, which Professor Dickey has pieced together from ancient papyri and medieval manuscripts, has scenes describing the daily life of ancient schoolchildren and so provides a unique insight into their lives and educational opportunities.

Professor Dickey came in 2013 to the University of Reading, where she is a member of the Classics Department and the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism; previously she worked at Columbia University in New York and the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Professor Dickey said, "I am delighted to be considered worthy to join the Academia Europaea, an illustrious group of admirable academics. This is a great honour for me and is due in part to the highly supportive environment provided by the University of Reading."

Professor Annalisa Marzano, Head of the Department of Classics, said: "I am thrilled at Eleanor's election as Fellow of the prestigious Academia Europaea. This additional accolade, less than a month from her nomination as Fellow of the British Academy, is another strong indicator of the high esteem in which her academic work is held internationally. We are proud to have Eleanor as a member of our Department."