Among the highlights of Tay’s distinguished career as an academic lawyer at the University of Sydney was her appointment as president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), a position she occupied from 1998 to 2003.
Marcia Langton is a leading academic and Indigenous spokesperson who has held the foundation chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne since February 2000.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, and Professor of Indigenous Studies at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
Science historian Ann Moyal’s leading work included Clear across Australia: a history of telecommunications (1984); A bright & savage land: scientists in colonial Australia (1986; second edition 1993); and above all Platypus (2001; published in the US under the title Platypus: the extraordinary story of how a curious creature baffled the world), which was a great success and remains in print.
During her 22 years at Murdoch University, Cora Baldock earned a personal chair as professor of sociology in 1993. She was both the university’s first female professor and its first professor of sociology.
Agnes Nebo von Ballmoos was a Liberian music professor, Liberian folk music scholar, conductor, composer, and lawyer. She helped preserve Liberian folk music by collecting and transcribing music from diverse cultural traditions around the country and composing original arrangements of traditional songs. She was a pioneer in the transcription of Liberian folk songs into written form and taught at the University of Liberia for nearly 30 years. Under her leadership, the university choir gave concerts at venues around the world, performing a varied repertoire that included classical pieces, spirituals, and traditional Liberian music.
Mercy Otis Warren was a published poet, political playwright and satirist during the age of the American Revolution—a time when women were encouraged and expected to keep silent on political matters. Warren not only engaged with the leading figures of the day—such as John, Abigail, and Samuel Adams—but she became an outspoken commentator and historian, as well as the leading female intellectual of the Revolution and early republic.
Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga was a Romanian scholar, essayist, political activist and professor at the University of Bucharest.
As a student at the university, she studied law (1939-43) and literature (1944-48), later earning her doctorate in 1970. Around the time a communist regime was established in her country, she went to the Soviet Union to study at the the Gorky Pedagogical Institute (1948-49). Dumitrescu worked as an editor at Editura de Stat from 1948 to 1949, and at Editura pentru Literatură until 1957. She was hired as teaching assistant at her alma mater in 1949, rising to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1963, full professor in 1971 and chairing the department of universal and comparative literature in 1975.
Having been a researcher at the George Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory until 1957, she became the director in 1973. From 1970 to 1982, she served as vice president for the Social and Political Sciences Academy, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1974. In 1975, she became president of the Romanian National Committee for Comparative Literature, and was on the executive board of the International Comparative Literature Association (1973-79). She edited two magazines, Synthesis and Revista de istorie și teoria literară. Among her published books were Renașterea: Umanismul și dialogul artelor (1971), Valori și echivalențe umanistice (1973), Periplu umanistic (1980) and Itinerarii prin cultură (1982).
Dumitrescu joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1966, and was a member of the party’s central committee from August 1969 to November 1974. She served two terms in the Great National Assembly, representing Bucharest districts both times (1975-85). She was awarded the Order of 23 August, fourth class, followed in 1971 by the Cultural Merit Order, second class and by the special prize of the Writers’ Union in 1986 and 1989. She was also granted the Order of Cyril and Methodius by the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in 1977, and the next year became a commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. She took the Herder Prize in 1988 and headed the Accademia di Romania in Rome (1991-97).
Late in life, she spent most of her time at the Romanian Orthodox Văratec Monastery and ultimately took the vows of a nun.
Amy Marjorie Dale, FBA was a British classicist and academi who published as A. M. Dale. Her research focused on Greek tragedy, especially Euripides and the metre of Greek tragedy’s choral songs and lyric parts, a subject area in which her work remains influential.
Her first academic post was at Westfield College in the University of London (1927-1929), followed by a job at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. During World War II, Dale worked in the Foreign Office, and spent her spare time translating Eduard Fraenkel’s edition of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon into English. She was later offered and accepted a lectureship at Birkbeck College, London. In 1952 she was appointed Reader in Classics, and in 1957 became a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1959, she was honoured with a Personal Chair in Greek and in 1962 was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She became Professor Emeritus in Greek at the University of London when she retired in 1963.
Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.