Staff Profile:Professor Jane Gardner

Name:

Professor Jane F. Gardner

Job Title:

Roman Historian - retired

Responsibilities:

Jane Gardner retired at the end of the academic year 1998-1999 after over thirty five years service to the University.

She became Professor of Ancient History in 1993 in recognition of her international reputation as a researcher. Her role as a teacher in the Department has been equally distinguished: she introduced key units on the history of women and slavery to the undergraduate syllabus, adapting her repertoire as the Department's curriculum has changed over the last three decades; and outside the University she has promoted the teaching of Classics to a wider public in the Department of Extramural Studies and in the Working Men's College, London. Locally, she has been a school governor and was an executive member of the Reading Association for Racial Harmony.

For sixteen years, she was Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, a resource utilised by school children studying the National Curriculum as well as undergraduate students in the Classics Department. Jane Gardner has been the life and soul of the Classics Department for the last three decades. She remains active in the department and her colleagues are glad of her continuing presence for help and advice.

As of the 1st October 1999 Jane Gardner has been Professor Emeritus.

Areas of Interest:

The Classics Department held an afternoon of papers to mark Professor Gardner's retirement on Thursday, 24 June 1999. Jim N. Adams (All Souls, Oxford), Fergus Millar (Brasenose, Oxford) and Thomas Wiedemann (Nottingham) gave papers on topics relating to Professor Gardner's research interests. Shortly before her retirement, she was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Oxford for her three books on Roman social and legal history.

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

Her publications include three major monographs: Women in Roman Law and Society stressed the value of Roman law as a source for social history and has become a classic volume for the study of women in antiquity; equally well-received was her next book, Being a Roman Citizen, a study of status in Rome; her most recent book, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life addresses the relationship between the legal institution of the Roman familia, and the realities of Roman family life. In addition to these major volumes, she has published on the subject of Roman myth, and she has promoted the reading of classical texts to a wider audience through the production of translations of key authors and thematic volumes, including Julius Caesar's Civil Wars and Gallic Wars (both still in print after almost thirty years). To bring the classical texts to the attention of a wider public, she produced two innovative sourcebooks: Leadership and the Cult of the Personality (1974), and (with Thomas Wiedemann) The Roman Household (1991).