Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Interviewer’s Introduction

• Dr Sarah Derbew received her PhD in Classics from Yale University and is currently Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows; starting in autumn2020, she will be an Assistant Professor of Classics in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.
• Her research focuses on critical and self-reflexive theorizations of race and skin colour in ancient Greek literature and art from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled “Decolonizing Blackness: Literary and Artistic Representations of Black People in Greek Antiquity”.
• In 2018, Dr Derbew released an interview for the Guardian in which she discussed the work and legacy of African American Classicists, in connection with an exhibition on Black Classicists at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. Before coming to Warwick, in October 2018, she also delivered a public lecture on black people in ancient Greek literature as part of the Exhibition Event Series. In the same month, she was co-organizer of a panel on ‘Afro-Greeks’ (on the engagement of African and Afro-Caribbean literatures with the Graeco-Roman Classics) in honor of Prof. Emily Greenwood, held at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States Annual Meeting.
• On 25th October 2018, thanks to the generous funding of the IATL and the HRC, Dr Derbew contributed to my Classics & Ancient History module ‘Africa and the Making of Classical Literature’ with a workshop and public lecture on Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women. Both in the lecture and in the workshop, she engaged in interdisciplinary practices, by showing the application of the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory to ancient Greek texts, and by reading ancient literature in conversation with 19-20 century anglophone American literature, in particular with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and novelist Ralph Ellison. Between the workshop and the lecture, Dr Derbew answered some questions about her research as well as her views on how to make both pedagogy and Classics more inclusive.