Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics at Princeton University in New Jersey, has received two prizes for his first scholarly book, Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 2020). The book places religion at the heart of the Roman Republic’s transformation during the fourth and third centuries and shows how religious ritual and observance bound Romans together at a time of rapid expansion and imperial violence.
Divine Institutions was awarded the 2022 American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (given for an author’s first book in European history from ancient times through 1815) and was co-recipient of the 2022 Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s First Book Prize.
Prior to his first academic publications, Dr. Padilla Peralta had written the memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin Press, 2015).
Dr. Padilla Peralta is a graduate of Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University.
