Darkness Visible: The Haunted House of Classics
Lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Associate Professor of Classics, Princeton University
Drawing on the writings of Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and César Sánchez Beras, this talk seeks to generate critical momentum around the premise that Classics is a ghostly matter, haunted by its participation in global projects of race-making but intent on denying or veiling its role in them. In heeding the call to resist “happy face Classics” (Rosa Andújar), Padilla Peralta argues for an explicitly foregrounded commitment to a reparative intellectual history of the discipline—one that owns up fully to the field’s past and contemporaneous investments in Euro-American settler-colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.
Join us for the inaugural lecture in this new series, featuring ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors will present their work in both unmediated and ‘meta’ modes. They will consider the motives and conventions of the work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities.
About the Speaker

A Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing, Dan-el Padilla Peralta graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2006 with a degree in Classics and a certificate in the School of Public and International Affairs. He was awarded the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship to read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008); and earned a PhD in Classics from Stanford (2014), with the generous support of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. After a two-year postdoctoral term as Mellon Research Fellow and Lecturer in Classics at Columbia University's Society of Fellows, he joined the Classics Department at Princeton, where he is now an Associate Professor. He is affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values.