Classicism and Other Phobias, with Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Dan-el Padilla Peralta joins me in the Lesche to discuss the critique of classicism that he articulates in his recent book Classicism and Other Phobias (PUP 2025).

Works mentioned (select)

• Adeshei Carter, Jacoby. “Racing the Canon.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 163–174. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” Harper’s Magazine, October 1953.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
• Eccleston, Sasha-Mae, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “Racing the Classics: Ethos and Praxis.” American Journal of Philology 144, no. 2 (2023): 199–218.
• de la Vega, Garcilaso. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Translated by Harold V. Livermore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.
• Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” The Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Edited by Mary-Alice Waters. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999.
• Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at the University of Michigan, October 7, 1988.
• Proctor, Hannah. Burnout: A Guide to the Psychopolitical Condition. London: Pluto Press, 2024.
• Shia, Moon-Ho Jung. Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
• Umachandran, Mathura, and Marchella Ward, eds. Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics. London: Routledge, 2023.
• Wynter, Sylvia. Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World. Manuscript, 1970s. Edited version published in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
• Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

About our guest

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Programs of Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015); Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020); and Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton 2025).

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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