Yasmina Mansour
Yasmina
I am a current sophomore studying Medicine, Science, and the Humanities, Sociology, and Anthropology. I joined the project because prior to the lab, my ideas and definitions of race were informed by the modern contexts in which I’ve experienced and watched race unfold. However, I believe in order to truly begin to understand a concept, you must first look at its origins and historical background. My involvement in this project has completely flipped my perspective pertaining to race. I’ve learned frameworks to discuss, think, and learn about race beyond biological and geographic constraints. I hope this project grows and evolves as more iterations of this lab continue. To future students, if you have any interest at all in this topic, get involved! I know it may seem intimidating if you have no background in Classic, but your perspective is invaluable to the field.
Yasmina’s Interview:
Can you share a bit about your background?
“So my background, I'm currently an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. My major is Classics. My minor is Islamic Studies. I have studied classics, basically, my entire undergraduate career,..the reason I got into [Classics] is [that] I studied Latin in high school. And, like, [I] came into contact with, just like the bare minimum, like classical history in that context and then, just like fell in love with it, decided to keep studying it– As I've studied [Classics], I realized, like, you just get deeper and deeper into, like, the complexities of the culture and the implications of that for us today.”
What led you to join the “Race against Time” research lab/website project?
“ I heard about… what the project would be from Doctor Pandey in an advising session. And I thought that it sounded really interesting. And… particularly because I myself have a lot of questions about the nature of race and the nature of discrimination, the nature of slavery and all of these different topics in antiquity, because I think that…American culture is deeply ingrained with aspects of culture from Greco-Roman antiquity. But I think that, as Americans when we think about Greco-Roman antiquity, we kind of just..copy-paste our ideas onto them. Which I think can be a problem. That's part of why I study classics, is to, like, disentangle these things... So basically all of that is to say.., I have a lot of questions about it, about race and antiquity, and that's why I joined the project.”
Can you speak about your contribution to the website?
“My contribution to the website…along with Jackie,..we are doing some pieces that revolve around the history of Latin education in the United States. And like how the way that Latin is taught, because Latin is for many people, their entry into classics.., how that is related to race and racism, particularly in the classroom, and what the future of Latin education should be going forward.”
In what ways has your involvement influenced, informed, or benefited you?
“I think the way that I've been the most benefited in the course of the project has just been talking to everyone [involved] in the project, and like hearing their ideas, which, like many of them, had never even occurred to me. I definitely like to try and maintain, every time I come to class, the attitude of, I'm here to ask questions and try to find answers to those questions. And so the interaction in the class has really just been the biggest benefit for me.”
What do you hope the impact of this project will be?
“ I really hope that the impact of this project will be…that it will cause readers who visit the website to think more about the assumptions that we make about antiquity and ancient history in general. I hope that it will challenge people to think about, what about our present day existence is the same, but what about our present day existence is different than how it was in antiquity? And like, really question, like, what do we actually know about the experiences of these people? But ultimately to realize, like, just like we're human beings, they were human beings, we can't, like make them into fictional characters or, like, a different species of thing, because that's just not true. Like, now we are humans, and then we were humans. And that's why this is interesting ultimately.”
Do you have a message for future students or users of this resource?
“I think my message for future students in the course, or users of the resource would be to remember, like, in every instance,...the human level of this project and the human level that naturally comes along with studying history and studying ancient peoples, like it's called humanities for a reason. And so I think it's when we start to forget that it is people that we're studying. That's when we, like, lose sight of why it's important to study race, why it's important to study history, why it's important to study basically anything…It's like we need to remember that the purpose is..to understand other humans better”
Yasmina’s contribution to the site:
Read: Source: Texts | The Amarna Letters
Read: Scholarship | Orientalism
Read: Source: Texts | Homer's The Odyssey
