Monty Python's Life of Brianwith Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta

1979 1 hr 34 min

R

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Princeton University’s Dan-el Padilla Peralta will introduce this screening and lead a Q&A after the film.

Brian Cohen is an average Jewish man who happened to be born on the same day as Jesus in a neighboring stable. He spends his life mistakenly and often hilariously mistaken for the messiah. This biblical parody is set during the Roman occupation of Judea and is peppered with the black comedy and absurdist humor that is a signature to the Python crew. Rated R.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a professor of Classics and associated faculty in African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Programs of Latino Studies and Latin 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). His latest book, Classicism and Other Phobias, an expansion of his 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, will be out with Princeton University Press in spring 2025. He has also 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). Projects in progress include a study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism, co-authored with his colleague 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 and racism in the disciplinary identity of Classics, to be co-authored with Brown’s Sasha-Mae Eccleston. With Eccleston, he co-founded Racing the Classics, which recently received $1 million in funding from the Mellon Foundation. He is a volume co-editor for The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora and sits on the board of the RaceB4Race collective.

Director Terry Jones

Cast Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin

Country USA

Language English

Aspect 1.85

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