Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Latino Studies.  He took up his appointment at Princeton (his undergraduate alma mater) following two postdoctoral years at Columbia’s Society of Fellows, a 2014 PhD at Stanford, and a 2008 M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History from Oxford.  His core research and teaching focus is the Roman Republic and Early Empire, in the study of which he blends social-scientific techniques with literary and material evidence.  His book in progress, Divine Institutions, argues that temple construction and pilgrimage networks held the ‘imperial Republic’ together as it expanded across Italy and the Mediterranean; all his work is driven by a concern with patterns of cultural and intellectual exchange.

Dominican by birth and a New Yorker by upbringing, Dan-el is a public intellectual who regularly writes and speaks on issues of education and social justice; he is the author of the 2015 autobiographical memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican boy’s odyssey from a homeless shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015).