Activist-Scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta ’06 Leaving Princeton

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Padilla Peralta’s response to being offered the Sachs Scholarship. He accepted it to study in England.

After a decade of teaching at Princeton, Dan-el Padilla Peralta ’06 is departing the University this summer both to fulfill his desire to work at a public institution and to leave an environment in which he said he feels targeted and undermined. 

At Arizona State University, where Padilla Peralta will start in August, he will be a professor in the School of International Letters and Culture and will teach courses on “ancient Mediterranean histories, literatures, and cultures,” according to an Arizona State announcement.  

Regarding his departure from Princeton, Padilla Peralta told PAW via email that when news of his recommended promotion to full professor in the summer of 2024 leaked to The Washington Free Beacon before it was official, it “effectively put a target on my back.” After another leak of materials he had prepared for faculty in advance of a faculty meeting, “it became hard to escape the impression that some faculty were intent on undermining if not actively jeopardizing the careers of their colleagues who spoke out in defense of Palestinian rights and/or in support of a more empowering and publicly minded approach to faculty governance.” 

He cited a “senior faculty member in the sciences who stared me down” as they called who Padilla Peralta assumes was a member of the media following a faculty meeting. 

“In response to an email from me about [the second] leak, Dean [of the Faculty Gene] Jarrett regretted the ‘unfortunate breach of our protocol’ but stated that there would not be an investigation into how these materials became public,” according to Padilla Peralta. 

The University declined to comment. 

Padilla Peralta was a vocal advocate for Palestinians during the Israel-Hamas war, introducing proposals at faculty meetings that defended student activists such as one that urged the University not to discipline pro-Palestinian students who established an encampment on campus in 2024 and another that called for an ad hoc faculty committee to review the University’s response to pro-Palestinian protests. In 2020, he campaigned for Princeton to do more to dismantle inherent racism and biases after University trustees removed Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs and a residential college, given the former president’s racism.  

Padilla Peralta told PAW he hopes Princeton can develop new governance structures to cultivate “an ethos of shared governance that acknowledges, and wherever possible seeks to act on, the responsibilities of the University to the local community at times of crisis and around specific crises” such as the Israel-Hamas war, immigration issues, and trans rights. 

Padilla Peralta has a history going back several years with Arizona State; he spoke in 2021 at a symposium for RaceB4Race, which is “by and for BIPOC scholars working in premodern critical race studies,” according to the organization’s website, and later became an executive member of the board, a position he still holds. Padilla Peralta will be an affiliate of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), which houses RaceB4Race; he is currently a member of the ACMRS press editorial board. 

As a self-described “mission-driven person,” he is excited to join the Arizona State faculty. “I relish few things more than being in community with fellow knowledge-workers who understand excellence in research and teaching holistically, and not as an aridly compartmentalized end in itself.” 

In 2021, Padilla Peralta detailed in PAW his complicated relationship with his chosen field of study: classics. He discovered a love for the subject as a child, but he also “believes his field must be transformed to make it more inclusive in its content and practitioners,” he said at the time. For years, he has advocated for classics to be more inclusive, and in his latest book, Classicism and Other Phobias, published in July, he argued that academia’s definition of the classics undervalues Black life. 

According to a 2021 profile in The New York Times, he “was often the only Black person in his Latin and Greek courses.” 

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In a 2006 essay for PAW, Padilla Peralta revealed he was an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and after moving to the U.S. as a 4-year-old, sometimes lived in homeless shelters. He came to Princeton on a full scholarship to study classics and graduated summa cum laude as salutatorian. 

Upon his graduation from Princeton, Padilla Peralta was awarded a two-year scholarship to study in England as a Sachs Scholar. He received his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University, then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia before joining Princeton’s faculty in 2016.  

In addition to his role in the Department of Classics at Princeton, Padilla Peralta is associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies, affiliated faculty in the Program of Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values, and faculty coordinator of the University’s Mellon Mays Fellowship.  

When asked what he’ll miss most about Princeton, Padilla Peralta said he doesn’t “incline much towards nostalgia. That said, I suspect I will miss Bent Spoon a great deal.”