Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a professor of classics. He is associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Program in Latin American Studies, the Program in Latino Studies, and the University Center for Human Values. His latest book “Classicism and Other Phobias” was published in July 2025 by Princeton University Press.
How did you get the idea for this project?
An invitation to give the 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University presented me with an opportunity to sharpen some ideas about the historical and contemporary interaction of classicism (as a discursive structure and as a material practice) with what the Black Studies trailblazer Sylvia Wynter has aptly termed “the overrepresentation of Man.” As I wrote, some ideas that had been trailing my earlier publications on the discipline of classics and the experiences of its minoritized practitioners fell into place: the urgency of striving for an “oppositional consciousness” that attends equally to the pasts and presents of the institutionalized study of the ancient world; the undervaluation of Caribbean and other Afro-diasporic knowledges as a direct function of Greco-Roman antiquity’s imperial overrepresentation; the desirability but also limitations of alternative classicisms; and the vitality of pursuing a practice of ancient studies that does more than pay citational lip service to Black study.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
I was initially unsure of the book’s form and scope: would it primarily take the form of an essayistic critique of the discipline of classics (as institutionalized in the modern Euro-Americas), or would it also fold in research in progress on Black American and Afro-Caribbean contestations and receptions of ancient Greece and Rome? (How) would this research be put to work as a mode of critique? After much writing around / introspection / twiddling of thumbs, I decided to preview some of this research in Classicism and Other Phobias but to carry most of it over to another monograph …
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
… This monograph in draft, tentatively titled “Letrao: Race, Classical Reception, and Classicism in Santo Domingo,” examines the long history of encounters with Ancient Greece and Rome on the island of Ayiti/Hispaniola, with a primary focus on the Spanish-speaking settler-colony and its successor-state the Dominican Republic. The guiding question for this monograph, which is in close methodological conversation with “Classicism and Other Phobias,” is how the mobilization of Greco-Roman antiquity in Dominican settings colludes with or sustains explicitly anti-Black intellectual and political agendas.
Why should people read this book?
It’s short! We love ourselves a short book/short king. And it has pictures. The most appealing visual element is the cover, designed to perfection by the artist Darryl Babatunde Smith.
Learn more about other publications by Princeton University faculty in the humanities by exploring our Faculty Bookshelf.
