Mary Beard is Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Newnham College; she is also Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. After completing her PhD at Cambridge, Mary lectured at King’s College London before returning to Cambridge where she has taught Classics since 1984. Her most recent books are Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith (Profile, 2018), Women & Power (Profile, 2017) and SPQR (Profile, 2015). She is currently completing a book on images of Roman Emperors in Renaissance and later art (Princeton Univ. Press).  She frequently appears on radio and television, including most recently a documentary on The Shock of the Nude (from antiquity to the present day). During the pandemic, she hosted an art series on BBC2 (Lockdown Culture) from her study at home. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2018.

Simon Goldhill, is Professor of Greek in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of King's College and currently Foreign Secretary and Vice President of the British Academy. His research interests include Greek Tragedy, Greek Culture, Literary Theory, Later Greek Literature, and Reception. He was formerly the Director of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, until his term ended in 2018. 

His book Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity won the Robert Lowry Patten Prize, and his book Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy won the Runciman Prize. He directed the ERC-funded project "The Bible and Antiquity in 19th-Century Culture" and currently is director of the Mellon-funded project "Religious Diversity and the Secular University".