Dr. Dan-El Padilla Peralta

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Professor of Classics and Associated Faculty in African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015), Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020), and Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton 2025); the co-editor of Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (with Matthew Loar and Carolyn MacDonald, Cambridge 2017) and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400–200 BCE(with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone, Cambridge 2023); and co-editor for The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, Volume 1: Africans and Antiquities, which has entered production. With Sasha-Mae Eccleston, he founded Racing the Classics, a Mellon-funded initiative. He is currently finishing two books: Letrao: Race, Classical Reception, and Classicism in Santo Domingo, for Routledge’s Classics and the Postcolonial series; and 338 BCE and the Origins of Roman Imperialism, co-authored with Denis Feeney, for Harvard University Press. In summer 2026, he will join the faculty of Arizona State University’s School of International Letters and Cultures.