William Bedell Stanford (16 January 1910 – 30 December 1984) was an Irish classical scholar and senator. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin between 1940 and 1980 and served as the 22nd chancellor of the university between 1982 and 1984. He was born in Belfast, the son of a Dublin-born Church of Ireland clergyman who served in Waterford and Tipperary. He was educated at Bishop Foy's School in Waterford, where a special teacher had to be recruited to coach him in Greek. He subsequently won a sizarship to Trinity College Dublin. He was elected a Scholar in his first year at Trinity, having become an undergraduate in October 1928. He also served as auditor of the College Classical Society. He was editor of TCD: A College Miscellany in Hilary term of 1931. He became a Fellow in 1934 and was one of the last Fellows to be elected by examination. Stanford was one of seven candidates nominated for the Provostship of the Trinity College on 11 March 1952 but was eliminated along with two other candidates in the first round of the election. He was considered, at the age of 42, to be too junior. The successful candidate on that occasion was the mathematician, Albert Joseph McConnell, who remained in office for 22 years. His grandfather's cousin was the composer Charles Villiers Stanford. Academic career Stanford established himself as a Greek scholar in his twenties with the publication of two books which approached Greek literature as a subject for literary criticism, Greek Metaphor and Ambiguity in Greek Literature. He is perhaps best remembered for his commentaries aimed at students on Homer's Odyssey, Aristophanes' Frogs, and Sophocles' Ajax. In 1965, Stanford gave the Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, on the topic of the pronunciation of Ancient Greek. The lectures were revised into a book published in 1967. Stanford had a particular interest in the classical tradition, in Ireland and elsewhere, and published a number of articles on this topic in the Trinity journal Hermathena, as well as a brief but wide-ranging book entitled Ireland and the Classical Tradition. A long-time member of the Royal Irish Academy, Stanford was appointed chairman of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies by the President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera. Stanford's poetry appears in several anthologies and his posthumously published memoirs. After Stanford's death, a series of lectures in