Profile
Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing – dulcius urbe quid est? – I graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in Classics with a SPIA certificate (2006; Latin Salutatory). I read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008) under the auspices of the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, and received a PhD in Classics from Stanford (2014) with the support of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. After two years at Columbia’s Society of Fellows, I joined Princeton Classics in 2016.
I’m a historian of the Roman Republic and Empire, with a keen interest in the longue durée histories and ecologies of western Afro-Eurasia. Early Roman comedy (especially Plautus), historiography (from Cato the Elder to Livy), and antiquarianism (Varro and Festus) are abiding concerns. The arc of Roman slavery in the period of Rome’s imperial expansion is central to my research and teaching, as are comparative histories of slavery, Black feminist theory and historiography, premodern critical race studies, and sociologies of knowledge production and epistemicide. I also work on classical reception in the U.S. and Latin America. Here, commitments to comparative political theory, Black Studies, and the history of citizenship are particularly salient.
I’m the author of three books: 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, which will appear in 2025 (Princeton 2025). I’ve co-edited two others: Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (with Matthew Loar and Carolyn MacDonald; Cambridge 2017); and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400 – 200 BCE (with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone; Cambridge 2023); and I’m a volume editor for the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora. See here for a list of my publications.
Projects now in the works include 338 BCE: Rome and the Age of Empires, co-authored with Denis Feeney (under contract with Harvard University Press); A People’s History of Rome (under contract with Princeton University Press); and a manifesto on race, racism, and the disciplinary identity of classics, co-authored with Sasha-Mae Eccleston. With Eccleston, I co-founded Racing the Classics, which received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. I also sit on the executive board of the RaceB4Race collective.
Public-facing scholarship and/as pedagogy matter a lot to me. I’ve taught for both the Justice-in-Education Initiative and the Freedom and Citizenship Program. I used to write for and sit on the board of the journal Eidolon; I’ve published pieces for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, the NYT, Fabulist, diaphanes, and Public Books. Many of my lectures are online.
Alongside my ancient history colleagues, I teach the Roman history undergraduate surveys (CLA 218 and 219), and ancient history seminars at the graduate level. I offer courses on Roman religion and law, Latin prose, the history of citizenship, ancient race and racialization, and the history of slavery. I’m currently advising dissertations on enslavement and habituation in the Roman world, trauma in post-triumviral Latin literature, Roman Republican magistrates in Greek sanctuaries, and the emergence of the Junian Latins. I’ve supervised junior and senior independent work on Etruscan pirates, the emperor Aurelian’s coinage, mid-republican anatomical votives, mock-archaism in Livy, female medical workers in the Early Empire, slavery and education in the Roman world, shadows in Vergil, Costa Rican myth in Greco-Roman garb, Stoicizing education for the 21st century, the plays of Luis Alfaro, classical reception in the first Haitian novel, Etruscan identity in the early Roman Empire, and the travels of the Apostle Paul.
I’m associated faculty in African American Studies, affiliated faculty in the Program in Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values, and faculty coordinator for the Princeton chapter of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.
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