Igor De Souza

Biography

My main academic interest is in the history of Jewish philosophy. My first book, Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed (2018), examined the earliest layer of commentaries (13^th-14^th c) on Maimonides’ philosophical summa, written in Spain, France, and Italy. I have also written on the genre of commentary as a cultural practice and as a vehicle for the circulation of philosophical ideas. My current short projects deal with esoteric (coded) language in two commentaries on the Guide by Joseph ibn Kaspi (1270-1340), and an investigation of the Guide as a philosophical commentary on the Bible. Although I work primarily with the Hebrew philosophical tradition, my interests extend to Jewish texts in Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew that respond to the trauma of the Iberian inquisitions. My next book project will focus on the interplay between trauma and identity in the early modern period, in European and colonial American contexts.

My teaching interests comprise both the history of philosophy and the history of sexuality. Some of my most recent courses are: ancient and medieval philosophy, in the Directed Studies program; Jewish feminist thought; sexual and other “outsiders” in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; and Jewish identity in the context of the Inquisition.

I received my Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago in 2014. I then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, in Montréal. In 2016 I joined the faculty at Yale as lecturer in Humanities, English, WGSS, and ER&M, and research scholar in the Judaic Studies program.