Those who know her say that she is a cultured, intelligent and generous person in all her facets. She was professor of ancient history at the University of the Basque Country and, currently, honorary collaborator of its Department of Classical Studies. Ana Iriarte Goñí will also now be an honorary doctor of the University of Oviedo, at the suggestion of the Deméter Group. Motherhood, gender and family, founded and led by professors from the Asturian academic institution.
She smiles on the other end of the phone when she answers the call from elDiario.es Asturias, because from Euskadi she is waiting “impressed and excited” for the moment of her inauguration in Oviedo. She recognizes that this is a “small recognition” and that in no case is she considered an equal to the women, few in number, only three, who received this appointment at the University of Oviedo , because “they are great”. Refers to Margarita Salas and Sheila Sherlock.
“Rosa tends to get me into trouble,” he said with a laugh. He refers to Rosa Cid, Asturian professor, friend and responsible for this proposal. Ana Iriarte was in Pergamon when she received the news, and she did so with surprise and gratitude, because, although she was informed that her name had been proposed, she never thought that it would come to fruition .
On her way through the lands of Herodotus and Troy, she had turned away after getting off a cable car because she was afraid of heights. That’s when she looked at her phone and saw the news on an Asturian digital channel. “My discomfort suddenly disappeared, but I still felt dizzy, although for other, happier reasons,” she says.
Iriarte came into contact with Asturian academics almost thirty years ago, in 1989, in Jarandilla de la Vera (Cáceres), during the founding congress of ARYS, the Association of Antiquity, Religions and Companies. It was there that he first met the historians Rosa Cid and Amparo Pedregal, and it was there that they began to form a close and deep professional relationship, as well as a sincere friendship that brought them here.
At this congress, Ana discovered the paths of ancient history in Spain, since she came from Paris, where she had studied for thirteen years and had prepared and presented her doctoral thesis, and there the perspective was very different from the one that exists in Spain at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s.
Disciple of the Hellenist and anthropologist, Nicole Loraux, like her teacher, had a very different conception of ancient history and the role of women in it, from that which took place here in Spain, burdened by forty years of dictatorship . This surprised her Asturian colleagues during their first contacts, and yet it is Iriarte herself who assures that she also had a lot to learn from them.
After giving a conference in Asturias in March 1992, which was her first visit to a region and a university that she loves and “which is loved”, in 1994 she gave her first courses in the new school of studies of genre from the University of Oviedo. , through the Gender and Diversity Doctoral Program, which later became the Gender and Diversity Masters.
Paris, 80s
Ana Iriarte began her career by addressing, through a study, the way in which the Greeks defined communication with women in ancient Greece, she delved into the political meaning of theater and wondered, for example, how a woman could exercise her citizenship if she did not do so. have political rights to do so: without a public voice, without the right to vote or without the possibility of holding political office.
Alongside her immersion in ancient Greece and the role that women played there, Ana Iriarte lives in a Paris which, according to her, “was not the place of mass tourism and kitsch lovers”. In those years, the French capital was an explosion of political development and feminist thought, which flourished from May 68, and where Iriarte’s teachers, like Jean Pierre Vernant, focused their debates on politics, while the city experienced a strong feminist movement that was interested in women in all systems, even in ancient Greece, where democracy was born by denying women the right to vote.
Ana Iriarte was a breath of fresh air who was able to renew studies on the ancient world from a double perspective: that of gender and that of historical anthropology.
Rosa Cid describes this newcomer as “a breath of fresh air that could renew studies of the ancient world”, and she does so from a double perspective. On the one hand, integrating the gender perspective, that is to say demonstrating what had never been seen or imagined until then in Spain, namely that a good story could be constructed from the feminist commitment; and on the other hand, including historical anthropology, approaching the analysis of myths from a historical perspective.
The French school from which Ana Iriarte came was absolutely transgressive for Spain in the 90s, since Iriarte was in contact with intellectuals like Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze, and others less transgressive like Jaquellines de Romilly.
For having been a pioneer in the introduction to Spain of new methodologies for the study of the ancient world, for her innovative character and for the novelty of her work and her contribution to Spanish historiography, Rosa Cid considers that the recognition that Ana Iriarte will receive Tomorrow, Wednesday, is more deserved and necessary.
The professional recognition of her Asturian colleagues is reciprocated by this woman from Pamplona who highlights the courage of the team of the academic institution of the Principality when it came to launching gender studies at the University of Oviedo , pioneer in its implementation. And in the early ’90s, gender studies was absolutely undervalued, she says, and “they, knowing what was happening in other European countries, knew that women’s studies had a present and a future.” she concludes.
Demeter Group
The Deméter Group is a research group founded in 2006 by the professor of ancient history at the University of Oviedo and specialist in the history of women and gender in Antiquity, Rosa Cid. Deméter is made up of historians specializing in women’s history, although over these almost 20 years it has developed and also integrated the profile of jurists and certain historians. This is the group that nominated Ana Iriarte for Honoris Causa.
Demeter was born from the need to analyze history from a gender perspective, changing the subject studied and putting women at the center of attention. They are currently immersed in the research project “Intrafamilial and political vulnerability in the ancient world”, the main objective of which is to define the subjects of vulnerability inside and outside the family in Greek Antiquity, Roman and Egyptian. Starting from a social and cultural perspective, they propose giving importance, for example, to age groups, to the option between free and slave population, or even to that between citizen and non-citizen.
Susana Reboreda Morillo, from the University of Vigo, and Rosa María Cid López, from the University of Oviedo, lead an international group of historians from Spanish universities (Vigo, Oviedo, Basque Country, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid) . ); Italian universities (Bologna, Benevento, Naples) and National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Ana Irirarte will be inaugurated and receive the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa tomorrow, Wednesday November 6, at noon, in the Auditorium of the Old Building of the University of Oviedo, joining the Spanish scientist Margarita Salas (1996). and the British doctor Sheila Sherlock (1998), both from the field of medicine and thus becoming the third honorary doctor of the Asturian University, the first in the field of humanities.
From 1967 to the present, the University of Oviedo has had 76 honorary doctors, of which only three are women, including Ana Iriarte Goñi.
The existing gap between the number of men and women Causa honorees is therefore obvious and results from the invisibility of women throughout history, in academia and in all fields. In this sense, the rector Ignacio Villaverde himself assures that this is a reality that must be worked on and the rector’s team has set to work.
