Series RAS BMM/14 - 1972 - Professor Mary Boyce

Nora Elisabeth Mary Boyce was born in India in 1920. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge with a double first. She joined the faculty of the Royal Holloway College, University of London in 1944, where she taught Anglo-Saxon literature and archaeology until 1946. Simultaneously she continued her studies, this time in Persian languages,under the guidance of Vladimir Minorsky at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 1945 to 1947. There she met Walter Bruno Henning, under whose tutelage she began to study Middle Iranian languages.
In 1948, Boyce was appointed lecturer of Iranian Studies at SOAS, specialising in Manichaean, Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Parthian texts. In 1952, she was awarded a doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge. At SOAS, she was promoted to Reader (1958–1961) and subsequently awarded the University of London's professorship in Iranian Studies following Henning's transfer to the University of California at Berkeley.
Boyce remained professor at SOAS until her retirement in 1982, continuing as Professor Emerita and a professorial research associate until her death in 2006. Her speciality remained the religions of speakers of Eastern Iranian languages, in particular Manichaeanism and Zoroastrianism.

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke on the 15th March 1823. It received its Royal Charter from King George IV on the 11th August 1824 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. It continues as a forum for those who are interested in the languages, cultures and history of Asia to meet and exchange ideas.