As the child of a Naval intelligence officer, she and her siblings traveled the world and were schooled in the languages–French and German, along with Latin–of wherever they happened to be. She says that despite all her international travel and opportunities, Chatham gave her something none of those places did–a place and the continuity to develop her own identity. She credits Miss Gillam, beloved Chatham Latin teacher, with turning her into a classicist.

Sarah attended Sarah Lawrence College where she first studied Greek, and then transferred to the Classics program at the University of North Carolina, where in 1976 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with the only classical archaeology degree in a class of 5,000 students. She has two Master’s degrees and a PhD in Classical Archaeology from Harvard, and spent two and a half years at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

She was awarded a Loeb Foundation Fellowship from Harvard to research ritual infanticide, has done a residency at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and supervised field excavations in Israel, Turkey, Greece, and Albania. She has traveled all over the world to supervise digs, speak about her research, and conduct tours.

Sarah is the author of so many scholarly papers and books that a single spaced list of them runs for two and a half pages. Her book dealing with the interaction of Greece with its Eastern neighbors, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, 1992, won the James Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America for 1993.

She has worked extensively with early Greek ceramics, fascinated by the stories of history and mythology the decorative images can tell.  She has a very holistic approach, not only examining objects as physical items, but for their context, and what they can tell us about the economics, cultural dynamics, and international connections at the time they were made. Although she enjoys the travel and exposure to new cultures that archaeological field work can involve, the real joy for her comes from the scholarship, the detective work of puzzling out the significance of what has been found.

Sarah is married to fellow UCLA classics professor, scholar and archaeologist John Papadopoulos, with whom she collaborates on digs, articles in scholarly publications, and books.