I am a historian and philosopher with research interests in the history of ideas, the invention of traditions, and the politics of translation. My 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 dissertation and first book project, I trace the history of the idea of civil disobedience to shed critical light on contemporary anti-protest rhetoric. I am also currently writing a family memoir with my mother, Nilva Moreira de Souza, probing how she, then a seven-year-old child, was sold into slavery during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1960s. My next project will investigate, in turn, the racial underpinnings of the increasingly popular idea that it is necessary to defend democracy against its enemies or against threats to it.
My essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Ethics, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Tocqueville Review, as well as in seven edited volumes in Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I have also reviewed books for American Ethnologist, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Political Theory, and Social Movement Studies. My public-facing scholarship has been featured in The Washington Post, Folha de S. Paulo, Africa Is a Country, the Los Angeles Review of Books, World Politics Review, Nexo Jornal, and Jacobin Brasil, among others, whilst my creative writing has appeared or will soon appear in Poetry, The Southern Review, BULL, Caliban’s Readings, Inkfish Magazine, and The Decolonial Passage. “She Is There,” a piece stemming from my family memoir, appeared in Best Small Fictions 2025. The anthology features the best 110 short stories published in English worldwide in the previous year. I have also provided expert commentary for Al Jazeera, Folha de S. Paulo, JPN, and Native News Online.
Academic Background
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Law and Society and History (by courtesy) at the University of California, Irvine, where I also serve on the Core Faculty for the Latin American Studies Minor and Graduate Emphasis. Previously, I was a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Government at Cornell University.
I received my B.A. in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo and pursued an M.A. in French and German Philosophy at 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 University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, the Law and Society Association, the Hannover Institute for Philosophical Research, the German Research Foundation (SFB Cultures of Vigilance), the French-Dutch Network for Higher Education and Research, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the UC Irvine Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism & Belonging, and Brazil’s Ministry of Education.
I have also 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 a member of the research project “Critical Theory and Religion” at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Institute for Social Research (IfS). In September 2022, I delivered a keynote speech—on what we can learn about Black resistance from Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno—at the conference “Epistemic Injustice and Recognition Failures” at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Teaching Experience
In addition to my creative and 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 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 the University of Vienna. I also taught at the University of Chicago’s Vienna Human Rights program in 2022 and 2023. At UC Irvine, I teach historically inflected courses on what counts as legitimate protest, on the criminalization of political actors deemed anti-democratic, and on what critical race theory (actually) entails.
Before joining UC Irvine, I also taught creative writing. Between 2023 and 2025, I offered masterclasses and craft seminars at the UEA Creative Writing Course, Tin House, The Center for Fiction, The Work Room (The Shipman Agency), The Berlin Writers’ Workshop, Corporeal Writing, and the Writing Workshops, among others. Kirkus Reviews featured one of these seminars, “Writing And/As/About Resistance,” as one of six “Writing Retreats to Inspire You in 2024.”
From 2025 to 2029, I will serve Brazilian universities as part of the program that funded my graduate studies in France. During this period, I will be a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Amazonas, where I teach in Brazil’s flagship graduate program on the Amazon rainforest, as well as a Visiting Professor of History at the Federal University of the Southern Border, founded in 2009 to serve the members of rural social movements in three Brazilian states: Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina. I am also currently a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Maria.
Creative Career
As an undergraduate, two of my flash nonfiction collections (crônicas) were recognized by the Nascente Book Award of the University of São Paulo: I was a finalist in 2009 (The Telegraphs) and received an honorable mention in 2010 (Concerning the Yanomami).
More recently, I have been selected for writing residencies at Yaddo, where I held the Abigail Angell Canfield and Cass Canfield Jr. Residency (Nonfiction), the Blue Mountain Center (Playwriting), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Playwriting), and the Vermont Studio Center, as a full fellowship recipient (Poetry). I also attended the 100th Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (Nonfiction), the 2025 Tin House Autumn Online Workshop (Hybrid Writing), the 2026 Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) Summer Workshop (Fiction), and the 2026 Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Poetry). In Michaelmas 2025, I was a Yosef Wosk Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.
Beyond the written word, I am interested in the political potentialities of theater and the performing arts. I performed between March and April 2016, Contained Measures of Shifting States by Otobong Nkanga, in lieu of the artist, at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. I have attended workshops on playwriting at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Célia Helena Center, on theater direction at Casa das Artes de Laranjeiras, and on acting at Teatro Escola Macunaíma, Theater of the Oppressed NYC, The Barrow Group, and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. I am currently teaching an acting workshop for first-year students at UC Irvine based on Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-actors.
In 2025, I received a VOICE Grant from the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement to organize a monologue contest on “The Voices of Democracy.” An interdisciplinary group of UC students, professors, staff, and a vice chancellor, along with a group of external writers, reviewed about 100 submissions and selected three monologues to be staged at UC Irvine in October 2026. In 2026, I received the same grant to stage Plato’s Symposium amidst efforts to censor it.
