Joan Smith | Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac
Sat 26 Apr 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Join acclaimed campaigner Joan Smith as she sheds new light on the often-overlooked women of Imperial Rome in her ground-breaking book. While these women were among the most privileged in their society, their lives were marked by suffering, including child marriage, marital rape, exile, and even murder. Until now, their stories have been shaped by emperors and chroniclers who painted them as murderers and nymphomaniacs—images largely reflective of the misogyny of the time and amplified by later works like I, Claudius.
Drawing on her years of campaigning against domestic and sexual violence, Smith offers a fresh perspective, uncovering a history of resistance against male authority. She revisits the original Roman texts to tell the true stories of these women—wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the first five Roman emperors—whose lives of spirited, inspiring, and sometimes reckless defiance were tragically erased or distorted.
Don’t miss the chance to hear Joan Smith discuss how she has unearthed a new narrative of these women’s courage and resilience, challenging centuries of misrepresentation.
In conversation with Shushma Malik
Venue: Glasses Station Stage (Old Divinity School)
Duration: 1 hour
Choose your tickets:
Author Biography
Joan Smith is an author and journalist. She has written columns for most national newspapers and reviews crime fiction for the Sunday Times. One of her earliest successes was the feminist classic Misogynies, and two of her novels were made into films by the BBC. She was Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board from 2013 to 2021. Her book Home Grown drew on that experience, revealing the links between domestic violence and terrorism. She has also worked extensively on free speech, chairing an English PEN committee that campaigned on behalf of imprisoned writers, and advising the UK Foreign Office on free expression.
Chair Biography
Shushma Malik is an ancient historian who specializes in Roman imperial history and classical reception studies. She is currently Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Onassis Classics Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge, 2020) and co-editor of Representing Rome’s Emperors: Cultural and Historical Perspectives through Time (Oxford, 2024).
