dpadilla@princeton.edu
Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing, I tricked myself into writing four junior papers and two senior theses en route to graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in Classics with a WWS certificate (2006; Latin Salutatory). I held the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship to read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008); the next stop was a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford (2014), generously supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. After a two-year postdoctoral stint at Columbia’s Society of Fellows, I returned to Princeton. In addition to my appointment in Classics, I am affiliated with the Program in Latino Studies. My core research and teaching focus is the Roman Republic and early Empire. Blending social-scientific techniques with literary and material evidence, Divine Institutions (in progress; PUP) argues that temple construction and pilgrimage networks held the “imperial Republic” together as it expanded across Italy and the Mediterranean. I have taught the Roman Republic undergraduate survey and co-taught (with Denis Feeney) a graduate seminar on the Middle Republic, a new course, “Citizenships: ancient and modern,” designed to push me—and students who enroll—well beyond our comfort zones.
Read Professor Padilla Peralta’s full biography on the Department of Classics website.
