Race B4 Race 2025, Seminar 1: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by the Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’

What are we reading?

For our first seminar meeting of the 2025-2026 year, we read Classics and Race: A Historical Reader (UCL, 2025), an open-access collection of primary sources with commentary, edited by Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells, and Phiroze Vasunia.

Sarah F. Derbew is Assistant Professor of Classics at Stanford University, where 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), and which we discussed in this seminar that same year, 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.

Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics, Head of Cultures at the Faculty of Arts & Humanities and chair-director of the Global Cultures Institute at Kings College London. His research focuses on the literary, scholarly, and cultural receptions of Greek and Latin literature from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century. His most recent book is Antiquity in Print: Visualising Ancient Greece in the Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London, who has written on a range of texts and periods, from antiquity to the modern era, and has research interests in the study of cross-cultural contact, colonialism, and empire. He is one of nine scholars who authored Postclassicisms: The Postclassicism Collective (2019) and the author of The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (2001) and The Classics and Colonial India (2013); additionally, he has edited a range of volumes prior to today’s book. His current projects include a book on postcolonialism and antiquity, and a comparative study of ancient Greek and Indian literature.

Why are we reading this?

This is our first time reading and discussing a collection of primary source material, as opposed to a single-author book or an edited collection of scholarly essays, and this book is an excellent example of the possibilities and rewards of this kind of work, which is often underappreciated when it is noticed at all. Each excerpt or set of excerpts is accompanied by a detailed commentary that offers historical and cultural context as well as a brief account of interpretative history and the uses to which that text was or may have been put.

Those of us who work on the premodern world depend on modern editions of the texts—and, to a different extent, artworks—we study. Partly this is a question of accessibility—many of these texts are necessarily restricted to a single location, and comparatively few people have the resources to travel to that location. While I have plenty of quarrels with nineteenth-century scholarly practice, I cannot overstate how valuable the many volumes of transcriptions and descriptions are, especially for texts that have since been lost or otherwise become inaccessible. But that also underscores a greater need for modern interventions into these editorial spaces—one that, sadly, is not often reflected in requirements for faculty jobs, tenure, and promotion, which privilege single-author monographs. These three scholars are long-established in their fields, and used their collective influence to produce not just a book of remarkable chronological and geographical breadth, but one that is truly accessible. Although the hard copies must be purchased, an open access PDF of the entire book is available online through UCL’s website.

With texts that range from the fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the book is split into four large, roughly chronological, sections. The first part, ‘Contestations of Race’, focuses on medieval and early modern texts, juxtaposing the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast (with commentary by Sarah Derbew) with more traditionally canonical European excerpts such as Petrarch’s Africa (commentary by Samuel Agbamu) or Bartolomé de las Casas’ Destruction of the Indies (commentary by Christian Høgel). The second part moves into the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, contrasting the justifications of writers like Jacobus Johannes (commentary by Grant Parker) and Johann Winckelmann (commentary by Daniel Orrells) for the practice of slavery, with the very real and impassioned voice of Phillis Wheatley, a Black woman whose references to the Roman African playwright Terence reveal a sense of kinship and pride.

The two remaining sections tackle, respectively, ‘Naming histories of race’ in the nineteenth century, followed by ‘Colonial and postcolonial meditations’ in the twentieth, concluding with Patrice Rankine’s meditation on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’.

Lastly, I want to point out the section of the introduction that offers different thematic modules that can be added to existing syllabi or used to create new courses focused on the intersection of classics and race. This is such a carefully and thoughtfully constructed volume in so many ways, and an absolute pleasure to read and discuss.

Further reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Routledge, 1989)

Alastair Bonnett, Multiracism: Rethinking Racism in Global Context (Polity, Cambridge, 2022).

Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford, 2013)

Evan Maina Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (SUNY Press, 2009).

African Athena: New Agendas, ed. Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon (Oxford, 2011)

Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times (London), July 3, 1982.

From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy (Ohio State University Press, 2014).

Derek Walcott, Omeros (Macmillan, 1990). Read an excerpt here.

Organizations to donate to:

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund
Anera
Jewish Voice for Peace
Save the Children
Avaaz (based in Syria)
Transgender Law Center
Advocates for Trans Equality
National Network of Abortion Funds