Overview
I am Eraldo Souza dos Santos, an intellectual historian with research interests in the history of ideas, the invention of political traditions, and the politics of translation. My current research explores how political concepts have come to shape political discourse and political practice, and how political actors have come to contest the meaning of these concepts in turn. In my first book project, I trace the global history of the concept of civil disobedience. I am also currently writing a family memoir that probes the actuality of forced labor and the afterlives of slavery in twentieth- and twentieth-first-century Brazil. My next project and monograph will provide in turn a racial genealogy of the idea that it is necessary to defend democracy against its enemies.
My articles are forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Ethics and The Tocqueville Review, and my review essays have appeared in American Ethnologist and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. My public-facing scholarship has been featured in Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Folha de S. Paulo, and Jacobin Brasil, among others, whilst my more creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Inkfish Magazine, Decolonial Passage, and elsewhere.
I am currently a Klarman Fellow at the Department of Government and will join the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society in Summer 2025. I received my B.A. in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo and pursued an M.A. in French and German Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague, the University of Wuppertal, and the University of Bonn as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar. I hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
I have been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Académie française, the Maison française d’Oxford, the Leuven Institute for Advanced Studies, the Munich Centre for Global History, the Friedrich Nietzsche College of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Hannover Institute for Philosophical Research, the German Research Foundation (SFB Cultures of Vigilance), the French-Dutch Network for Higher Education and Research, and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel.
I have held visiting positions at the Center for Law and Philosophy at the Université catholique de Louvain, the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, and the Chair of Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the University of Lausanne. Between 2015 and 2018, I was also one of the members of the research project “Critical Theory and Religion” at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Institute for Social Research (IfS). In September 2022, I delivered one of the keynote speeches—on what we can learn about resistance by reading Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno—at the conference “Epistemic Injustice and Recognition Failures” at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
In addition to my research activities, I have taught history, philosophy, and political science at the Sorbonne, Sciences Po Paris, Bielefeld University, the Leibniz University Hannover, the University of Potsdam, and the Charles University in Prague, in both undergraduate and graduate programs. In the spring and summer of 2022, I was an Erasmus+ visiting lecturer at the University of Southampton and at the University of Vienna. I also taught at the University of Chicago’s Vienna Human Rights program in 2022 and 2023.
Along with Vikram Visana, I convene the WPSA Virtual Community “History and Politics.”