 Chairman, ladies, gentlemen, and colleagues, it is an honor and a great pleasure to present to you Claudia Rodin. Claudia Rodin is the author of 10 popular and critically acclaimed cookery books, not to mention numerous re-editions. But to quote the historian Simon Shama, Claudia Rodin is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Prost was a biscuit baker. She is, rather, memorialist, historian, ethnographer, anthropologist, essayist, poet, who just happens to communicate through time, taste. Claudia Rodin was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1936 to Sephardic Jewish parents originating in Aleppo, Syria and Istanbul, Turkey. She attended the English school Cairo and then at the age of 15 went to Paris, where she was a border in Elysee for three years before coming to London to study art at St. Martins. Her parents left Egypt in 1956 after the Suez crisis as a result of the ongoing war with Israel. And they joined her and her two brothers in London. After leaving St. Martins while working for Alitalia for four years and later as she raised her family, she began collecting recipes from relatives and friends and writing about food and cookery as a way of reconnecting with her own heritage. Her first book, entitled The Book of Middle Eastern Food, published in 1968 and reprinted by Penguin in 1970, revolutionized Western attitudes to the cuisine of the Middle East and North Africa. Her intensely personal approach and her passionate appreciation of the dishes introduced readers to a new world of foods both exotic and wholesome. The book was a best seller and received great critical acclaim leading to a substantially expanded re-edition in 1986. The work's influence was recognized in 1992 when she received the Glenn Fiddich Trophy in celebration of a unique contribution to the food that we eat in Britain today. In 2010, the book was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in the United States for the influence it has had on food there. She continued to write about food in the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Italy and Spain with a special interest in the social and historical background of cooking. In 1977, she published Coffee, which was followed in 1982 by Picnic, the complete guide to outdoor food. Then came the BBC television series, Mediterranean Cookery with Claudia Rodin and the accompanying book, Mediterranean Cookery, published in 1987 with expanded re-editions in 2003 and 2006. This was followed by the Sunday Time series, The Taste of Italy, and a book entitled The Food of Italy, published in 1989. Her next work, The Book of Jewish Food, an Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the present day and published in the United States in 1996 and in the UK in 1997, featured the cooking of communities around the world and won eight international awards. Her latest books are Claudia Rodin's Invitation to Mediterranean Cooking, which came out in 1987, Tamarind and Saffron, favorite recipes from the Middle East, published in 2000. Arabesque, sumptuous food from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, which came out in 2005, and The Food of Spain, which was released earlier this year, are all truly delectable pieces of work. Over the course of her career, she has worked as a gastronomic foreign correspondent for several national newspapers, run cookery classes and given seminars and masterclasses for chefs in several countries, provided menus and recipes for restaurants, and planned menus with recipes for Guy's Hospital in London, which served as a model for other hospitals, including St. Thomas's. She has served for many years as co-chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and she is the recipient of numerous honors, including a fellowship in 2010 at the Institute of Advanced Study Yale University, and this year, a Life Achievement Award from the Guild of Food Writers. In the words of my colleague, Professor Denise Candiotti, it would be fair to say that Claudia Rodin, by opening a window on patterns of conviviality and cuisine in the Middle East, has done more for an understanding of the region than most area specialists. She has used history, oral narratives and interviews to build a phenomenal corpus of knowledge on the Levant, the Mediterranean and beyond, in a way that illuminates cultural continuities and the circulation of people and ideas. She has also popularized her work through numerous high-profile media appearances and her service on important boards, such as the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in the Netherlands. She is a celebrity in the best sense of the word, using her high profile to promote deeper understanding of Middle Eastern cultures. Chairman, it is my privilege now to present Claudia Rodin for the award of an honorary fellowship of the school and to invite her to address this assembly. I am quite overcome. Thank you so much, Harry. It's a great, great honor to be an honorary fellow at SOAS. I heard Harry, Harry and a little team, doing a presentation at the Oxford Symposium of Food only a couple of weeks ago. And it really was just, I realized just how broad and brilliant and exciting the scope of his Center of Food Studies is at SOAS. So I believe it's the first university really to be doing courses on food studies. And so I'm really delighted and honored and I very, very much appreciate being associated with SOAS. When I started researching food, it was a taboo subject of conversation at the same time as sex and money was. But now it's become fashionable, as you all can see. In London, everybody talks about food and it is a great subject. But until a very few years ago, apart from a few anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Claude Levy-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Harry West, it wasn't considered an important part of culture through which you can study society, history, folklore, agriculture, geography, nutrition, psychology, economics, what else? Almost anything that you study, you can look at food as well. Well, for a long time, it was considered women's business frivolous and insignificant, a subject of women's magazines. Well, for me, it was just a way of discovering the world. Discovering any part of the world I could go around and just by interviewing people and saying, I want a recipe, tell me what your parents did, what did they cook, I discovered a whole world through just doing that. And it made me also able to travel, and at the time that I was traveling, also as a woman alone, if I didn't have a mission, it would be a bit suspect. But there, I would always say, I'm looking for recipes. I'm wanting to see how you cook. And of course, I was invited to eat and to go in the kitchen. And the kitchen is the best place to get all the information that you want. All the secrets come out there. Thank you. Thank you.