Alice-Mary Talbot, Director Emerita of Byzantine Studies, received a degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from the University of St Andrews on June 25. Tim Greenwood, a Byzantinist and senior lecturer in the School of History at St Andrews, cited Talbot’s groundbreaking research on Byzantium and her invaluable service to other scholars in her field. An excerpt from Greenwood’s laureation address is below:
[Alice-Mary Talbot’s] contribution to the study of middle and late Byzantine social and religious history in general, and women and religious culture in Byzantium in particular, has been immense; even in retirement she has continued to make Byzantine literature available in English translation through the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. But her contribution to the discipline and to academia goes beyond her published and edited works. Alice-Mary Talbot has had a transformative impact in two other ways, for she is one of the generation of pioneering female scholars in the United States who broke through the glass ceiling back in the 1970s and transformed academic life and culture as a result. Moreover, Alice-Mary Talbot is famous for her generous encouragement of the research of younger scholars.