Books

Roman Diversity

Princeton University Press | 2024

In almost every classics class I’ve taken, and many I’ve taught, I’ve been the only brown-skinned person in the room. As a student, I enjoyed my white professors’ raised eyebrows at my excellent Latin. I took an adolescent thrill in bucking expectations that I’d follow other Asian kids into science, engineering or computing. Over time, though, I came to resent the extra work I had to do to compensate for not looking the part of a classics professor. I want to build a world where scholars of every stripe – where you, dear reader – don’t have to face the gatekeeping implied even in that casual question: “What’s someone like you doing in classics?”

I’ve gotten versions of this question all my life.  

This book is my answer.

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Classics for Modern Life

Yale University Press | 2025

I think of “classics” – traditionally defined as the study of ancient Greece and Rome – as the making of meaning across times and cultures. It’s an inclusive intellectual home where all of us are equally foreign to the past and therefore equally equipped to examine and live its lessons. The immigrant sense of displacement and desire for belonging that drew me to old books also highlights antiquity’s untapped potential to speak to people across the globe struggling to find transnational communities, identities, and careers amidst modern crises.