The second half of the 4th c. BCE witnesses a series of dramatic transformations throughout Afro-Eurasia, foremost among them a rapid escalation in state formation processes and the emergence of new (or newly aggressive) territorial empires. Concentrating on the 330s BCE, this lecture will pair a thick description of these transformations with an attempt at their analysis. 

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies, at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge 2017) and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400 – 200 BCE (Cambridge 2023). He is currently working on Classicism and Other Phobias, the subject of his 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard. He is a volume co-editor for The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora and sits on the board of the RaceB4Race collective.

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