On March 28-29, the Classics department welcomed to campus Sarah Derbew, currently a PhD student in Classics at Yale.  Sarah conducted a seminar for our Greek language students, and also delivered a public lecture on “Hidden Identities:  Black Skin Color in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika.”  Sarah’s lecture featured work from her current dissertation, entitled “The Metatheater of Blackness: Looking at and through black Africa in ancient Greek literature and art,” which presents a cumulative and interconnected argument about the capacity for critical and self-reflexive theorizations of race and identity in the “Greek” Mediterranean from the fifth century BCE to the third century CE.