The esteemed classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta (2023 Resident) will deliver a lecture, open to the public through Zoom, entitled “338 BCE and the Transformation of the Central Mediterranean.” The lecture begins at 11:30am Central European Time (5:30am Eastern Time).

Padilla is an associate professor of classics at Princeton. Born in the Dominican Republic, he came to the United States with his family when he was four years old. Studying Latin and Greek from a young age, Padilla attended Princeton and graduated summa cum laude. Following Princeton, he studied at Oxford and received a PhD from Stanford University.

Padilla’s research focuses on the Roman Republic and early Empire, as well as classical reception in contemporary American and Latin American cultures. His interests are connected by “an enduring concern with patterns of cultural and intellectual exchange.” He is also known for his activism both on issues of national policy relating to immigration as well as within the field of classics. In 2021, the New York Times Magazine profiled Padilla in an article called “He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?”

Padilla has written two books: Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (2020), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize; and a memoir called Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2015), winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Padilla has also coedited two books: Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (2017) with Carolyn MacDonald and Matthew P. Loar; and the recently published Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400–200 BCE with Seth Bernard (2011 Fellow) and Lisa Marie Mignone (2007 Fellow).

This lecture is only open to the public via Zoom.