Sarah Derbew received her PhD in Classics from Yale University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. At Stanford, she is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Her research has focused on the literary and artistic representations of black people in ancient Greek tragedy, historiography, satire, and the novel. In her first book, titled Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2022), she used critical race theory and performance theory to untangle ancient formulations of blackness. She also examined artistic renderings of black people in Greek antiquity, examining both the objects themselves and the museums in which they are displayed. Her interests extend to the twenty-first century; she has written about the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in Africa and the African diaspora.
She recently co-edited the open-acess volume Classics and Race: A Historical Reader with Dr. Daniel Orrells and Dr. Phiroze Vasunia, and she is currently researching the intersections between Greek and African antiquity, focusing on Aksum in northeast Africa.
She warmly welcomes students interested in any of these topics to her courses and to the Classics department.
