Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Professor of Classics in the School of International Letters and Cultures. Before migrating in search of warmer suns, he taught at Princeton (2016-2026) and Columbia (2014-2016). His research areas include Roman history, Latin and Greek literature, classical reception studies, premodern critical race studies, Black studies, Caribbean Studies, and slavery studies.
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). He is co-editor of Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge 2017, with Matthew Loar and Carolyn MacDonald) and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400 – 200 BCE (Cambridge 2023, with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone), and Volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora (in production, with Solange Ashby and Eve M. Troutt Powell). He is currently working on 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. Here is a list of his publications.
With Sasha-Mae Eccleston (Brown), he founded the Mellon-supported fellowship program Racing the Classics. Dan-el sits on the executive board of RaceB4Race, which is housed in ACMRS, and he is a contributor to Throughlines. In 2024, he gave the Marshall Distinguished Lecture.