We’re thrilled to announce that PUP has acquired World rights, including ebook and audio, to A People’s History of Ancient Rome by Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta. This vital, major new history will tell the story of the ancient Roman world from the ground up by reconstructing the worlds of non-elite and subjugated peoples whose stories have generally been excluded from the grand narratives of Rome’s empire.
The book will be an attempt to reckon with what Professor Padilla Peralta has identified as Roman “epistemicide.” In a paper recently published in the journal Classica that engages with postcolonial theorists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Padilla Peralta elaborated on the “staggering loss” of intellectual diversity throughout the Roman world across “multiple vectors—from mass enslavement to ecological upheaval” and articulated the urgency of confronting and embracing the extensive intellectual and ethical “recalibration” that is needed to truly write Rome’s history. Padilla Peralta’s editor Rob Tempio notes that, “the time has come for a history like this. With Dan-el’s unique scholarly acumen, this is a real opportunity to give voice to the voiceless of the Roman world.”
About the Author
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is the author of Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (PUP, 2020) and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, as well as co-editor of Rome: Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation. An Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University—where he is affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies as well as the University Center for Human Values—Padilla Peralta was a member of the editorial board of, and contributed writing to, the journal Eidolon.
His public writing, which has also appeared in the Guardian, Matter, and Vox, is motivated “by the sense that writing and teaching have a vital role to play in the pursuit of social justice, and by the strong conviction that classics and classicists should be allies and champions for Black and Brown folk.” You can read a profile of Padilla Peralta in the New York Times Magazine and follow him on Twitter at @platanoclassics.