Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Dan-el Padilla Peralta (also Dan-el Padilla) is a Dominican-born classicist. He is a professor at Arizona State University who researches and teaches the Roman Republic and early Empire, as well as classical reception in contemporary American and Latin American cultures.

Early life Padilla immigrated with his family to the United States in 1989, when he was four years old. Padilla's father returned to the Dominican Republic while his mother remained, raising Padilla and his infant brother in homeless shelters in New York City. Padilla's younger brother, Yando, is a United States citizen by virtue of his birth in the United States.

Padilla applied for early admission to Princeton University and was accepted in December 2001. He admitted on his application that he did not have legal status in the United States. Princeton awarded him a full scholarship out of its own funds because his immigration status made him ineligible for federal aid programs. Attending Oxford would require Padilla to leave the United States, upon which he would likely be unable to return legally due to having no visa. Due to his having been in the United States unlawfully, if discovered, he would have been unable to apply for ten years. Further, without a work visa he would be unable to find work in the United States as a scholar and professor, his intended occupation. In April 2007 Padilla was issued a one-year H-1B Visa allowing him to work as a research assistant at Princeton while attending Oxford.

Career In June 2014, Padilla received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in classics, and, in Fall 2014, became a fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. As a Fellow he was a lecturer in classics at Columbia. Padilla Peralta was featured in the New York Times Magazine on February 2, 2021, in the article "He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?".

Immigration advocacy and memoir Along with his academic and political supporters Padilla campaigned unsuccessfully in 2006 for passage of the DREAM Act, which would have allowed high school graduates who had been undocumented immigrants since childhood, to become legal residents if they agreed to attend college or served in the United States Armed Forces.

Writings Books Classicism and Other Phobias. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League. Penguin Books, 2015.

Edited volumes

Rome, Empire of Plunder. The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation, ed. by Matthew P. Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Articles and book chapters