Lylaah L. Bhalerao came to ISAW as a Fulbright scholar (All Disciplines Award 2021-22) from the United Kingdom, having received a BA (2020) and MPhil with Distinction (2021) in Classics from the University of Cambridge. While there, she became interested in decolonizing knowledge, museums, and heritage sites, as well as the relationship between Classics and Islam, and India respectively.
Lylaah is committed to a critical, intercultural study of antiquity from the Mediterranean to South Asia and Africa. Her current research explores blackness in antiquity employing methodologies from Black Studies and Postcolonial Studies, including black and Asiatic feminisms and theories on race. She is also interested in cultural exchange, transmission of knowledge, and movement of people (and beasts) between the Mediterranean, Africa and India in the late first millennium BCE-early first millennium CE. More generally, she studies the material culture of, broadly defined, the Greco-Roman world—stretching east through central Asia to India, south to north Africa, and west to the Punic world and Roman Britain—and has begun to develop an interest in the relationship between classical Sanskrit literature and Greek and Latin texts.
Lylaah is also interested in museology and object-based pedagogy, both of which she is involved in at ISAW through the Exhibitions department and the Expanding the Ancient World program. She is committed to dismantling barriers to engagement with higher education and museum institutions for underrepresented groups and she is happy to speak to young people of colour interested in studying the ancient world and help them navigate fields where they may find they are underrepresented.