Blog: An interview with Sarah Derbew, author of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity
By Lylaah Bhalerao | November 1, 2022
Before we get into the book itself, I take her back to the origins of her ideas about race in antiquity. She says she became interested in these issues at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where she went before her Ph.D. at Yale. There she “met so many people from different backgrounds who cared deeply about ancient languages and ancient cultures.”
She also valued the importance of seeing non-white educators of the Classics. “A lot of my classmates were teaching in public schools, so I really got to start seeing educators look very different from what I was used to in college or high school, when I was learning Latin.” She herself spent time volunteering at the Brooklyn Latin School.