A Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing, Dan-el Padilla Peralta graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2006 with a degree in Classics and a certificate in the School of Public and International Affairs. He was awarded the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship to read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008); and earned a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford (2014), generously supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. After a two-year postdoctoral stint at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows, he returned to Princeton and is now an Associate Professor in the Classics Department. He is affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values.
Padilla Peralta is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Republic (Princeton 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge 2017). His current projects include a co-authored study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism (under contract with Harvard), a co-edited volume on the long fourth century BCE (under review), and a co-authored book-length essay on race and ethnicity in the disciplinary identity of Classics. A staunch believer in the importance of public scholarship, he has written for and sits on the editorial board of the public-facing Classics journal Eidolon and has published pieces for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, the NYT, and Fabulist. His writing, teaching, and research are guided by a firm commitment to anti-racist principles.
