Academic Team
Elsa Celestina Costa
Faculty member in History
Fields of Interest:
- History of empire
- History of political thought (Renaissance and Enlightenment)
- History of philosophy (Renaissance to present)
- History of religion
- European history and philosophy
- Latin American history and philosophy
- History of capitalism
Education:
- Ph.D. 2021, Duke University, USA
- PostDoc: 2021-2022, Duke University, USA
Bio:
Elsa Costa is joining Fulbright University Vietnam from Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral instructor and where she also received her Ph.D. in 2021. Her teaching comprises diverse thematic courses incorporating and teaching methods drawn from cultural history, history of philosophy, economic history, social history, and oral history, with the geographical and chronological center of gravity in Europe and the Atlantic world since 1450.
Her primary research tracks the evolution of theories of sovereignty in the Iberian and Ibero-American world from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Her dissertation, “The Bourbon Ideology: Civic Eudaemonism in Habsburg and Bourbon Spain,” focused on the ways in which Spanish reformers and statesmen appealed to “the public happiness” in order to justify a damaging policy of internal colonization at home and in Spanish America. She is currently revising it into a monograph, although she has also published one chapter, on the Spanish Enlightenment, as a standalone article.
Costa is also interested in twentieth-century philosophy and has published on modern French, German, and Brazilian philosophy, on the legacy of structuralism and the tensions and intersections between an enduring metaphysics inherited from the pre-Reformation university tradition and modern (often Marxist) structural analysis. Her work on Brazil has been cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and her work on Germany by the Palgrave Walter Benjamin Handbook. Her volume on Walter Benjamin, A Secret Agreement with the Past, is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press.
Costa has received funding from the Tinker Foundation, the Fulbright program, the Institute for Humane Studies, and numerous other programs and institutions. She was also an editor, interviewer, and contributor for the Journal of the History of Ideas’ online presence.
Select Publications:
Forthcoming: A Secret Agreement with the Past: Walter Benjamin’s Pre-Enlightenment Sources. University of Delaware Press.
2024 “Against Reason: Juan Pablo Forner and the Enlightenment of Sentiment and Sensibility.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 47.3 (ISSN: 1754-0194) Pp. 297-317. doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12945
2021 “’But I Want the Truth!’: The Legacy of Martial Gueroult in São Paulo Philosophy, 1935-2018.”A Contracorriente 19.3 (ISSN: 1548-7083). Pp. 70-105. https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/1875/3466
2020 “When the Angels Played: Monadology and Divine Absconsion in Walter Benjamin.” Doctor Virtualis 15 (ISSN: 2035-7362). Pp. 91-138. doi: 10.13130/2035-7362/13119
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