“Palmyra For A While Stood Forth The Rival Of Rome”

Prof TREVOR BRYCE

Emeritus Professor Trevor Bryce (born 1940) is a Classicist and and Near Eastern historian. He has published extensively on the Classical and Near Eastern civilizations: his most recent publications are The Kingdom of the Hittites (new edition), The Trojans and their Neighbours, which includes a discussion on the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations, and The Routledge Handbook of the Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and has held visiting Fellowships at Princeton, Oxford and Canberra. His university career has included appointments as Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England, Australia and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Lincoln University, New Zealand.

Dr KAREN EXELL

Dr Karen Exell took up her current post of Curator of Egypt and the Sudan at the Manchester Museum in October 2007. After completing a degree in Egyptology with Akkadian at Oxford University, and a PhD at the University of Durham, where she also worked as a curator at the University Museums, she worked at the Egypt Exploration Society, London, before moving to Manchester. Her particular research interests include the meaning and interpretation of ancient Egypt in the West, and social and ritual practice in Ramesside Egypt.

She has written a number of articles and conference papers on these subjects, and is currently writing a book on the social significance of Ramesside period votive stelae. Dr Exell takes regular tours to Egypt, teaches aspects of ancient Egypt for the University of Manchester, and lectures regularly to ancient Egypt societies.

Prof KATE WILSON

Kate Wilson was educated at Oxford where she read English, and in Italy. The author of twelve books on a wide variety of topics from Marriage to Adoption and foster care, Kate is now Emeritus Professor in Social Work at the University of Nottingham, having previously lectured at the universities of Hull and York. Before that she was a probation officer in London, and a sales assistant at John Lewis, an experience about which she has good stories to tell.

As well as lecturing in many parts of the world on her own professional subjects, Kate frequently presents and discusses the work of her mother, the poet Anne Ridler, who worked and shared friendships with such notable writers as TS Eliot, Lawrence Durrell and WH Auden, whom Kate also met. Widely travelled, especially in Italy, Kate has now returned with her husband Richard to the family house in Oxford where she grew up.

Kate has served as a member of the Arts Council, has been a non-executive director of a hospital trust, and continues as external examiner at two British universities and to chair a number of social work study groups and committees. Already a keen tennis player, she hopes to learn more about playing bridge on board ship. Kate and Richard have three sons.

Prof RICHARD WILSON

Richard Wilson was educated at Cambridge, Oxford and in France. His recent academic appointments were as international visiting professor at Portland State University and as visiting professor at Northwestern University. After an early career as a British Council lecturer in Africa and the Middle East he was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the United States where he worked for and lectured at a number of leading North American organisations and universities, including the Council for Foreign Relations, the Humanities Institute, and Columbia and Northwestern universities.

In the UK he has lectured and been visiting fellow at the universities of Hull, York and Aberdeen. As Staff tutor in Arts, and chair, Literature in the Modern World, at the Open University and director of the Open Universities Drama summer schools, he worked with John Gielgud, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, Janet Suzman, and other prominent actors and directors.

A fiction prize-winner and BBC-trained presenter, Richard wrote and presented the BBC series Writers and Places, a theme he returns to in his talks on the ship. He and his wife Kate Wilson gave a keynote presentation at the annual general meeting of the USA Humanities Institute in Chicago, and Kate will join him from time to time in his presentations during the voyage. Richard is a former barge-hand, farm labourer, dishwasher at London restaurants, and Lyke Wake walker.