Mara Gold

Mara Gold is nearing the completion of her PhD/DPhil in Classics at the University of Oxford, investigating sapphic history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on understanding and performing sapphic identities through the ancient world. As well as her undergraduate degree in Classics, she has an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), a Graduate Diploma in Archaeology (UCL) and an MSt. in Modern British and European History (Oxford). She has written and performed for stage and radio, as well as acting and presenting on-screen.

She is equally passionate about her work with museums in both research and outreach. Having worked for GLAM (Oxford’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums) as a community connector, she now does freelance consultancy work with museums as well as workshops, training and talks. She worked as a researcher on the National Lottery Heritage funded Beyond the Binary project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where she undertook in-depth research into the museum’s collections, creating ways to tell LGBTQIA stories and connecting people to the past by drawing parallels with contemporary activism.

She was particularly interested in uncovering sapphic stories through the history of witchcraft and vice versa - an interest which filters into her daily life. She has published on feminism and archaeology (Bloomsbury) and has chapters about to be published on women’s comedy as activism in the early 20th century (Bloomsbury), and late 19th century lesbianism and the classical world (Cambridge University Press). She curated and narrated an audio tour for the Ashmolean Museum on disability, chronic illness and neurodivergence through history in collaboration with other disabled museum visitors. As a disabled and autistic lesbian, she is extremely passionate about championing access. And cats. She loves cats.