Following the unanimous recommendation of the Outreach Prizes Committee, we wish to deliver the exciting news that Candida R. Moss has been awarded the 2024 Mary-Kay Gamel Outreach Prize by the SCS. Dr. Moss is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, but is also a public intellectual who has written as a columnist for The Daily Beast and is most recently the author of God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the BBC, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. From martyrdom to ancient scribes, Dr. Moss has helped to define fields while also engaging with the public through both writing and her work as a papal contributor at CBS news. She has helped to bring together both classicists and scholars of ancient religion in order to address new questions, interrogate acquisition policies within the museum space, and recover the lives of ancient enslaved workers.
In 2024, the Society for Classical Studies renamed the Outreach Prize in honor of Mary-Kay Gamel to recognize her distinguished record of both popular and scholarly outreach. Gamel, who was a Professor Emerita of Classics, Comparative Literature, and Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was awarded the 2009 Outreach Prize for her work “translating, reconceptualizing, and staging Greek and Roman plays for diverse modern audiences for more than twenty years.” To learn more about the prize and to see a list of previous recipients, visit the Mary-Kay Gamel Outreach Prize page.
