Elsa Celestina Costa

Fields of Interest: Elsa Costa’s research and teaching interests lie in the political and economic history of the early modern Atlantic world, in particular that of Spain and its New World possessions. She is also interested in the history of philosophy since 1500.

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 is a postdoctoral associate in early modern history and where she also received her Ph.D. in 2021. Her teaching focuses on Europe from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and on late colonial Latin America, with a special focus on empire, race, and political economy.

Her research focuses on 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,” focuses on the ways in which Spanish reformers and statesmen appealed to “the public happiness” in order to justify expanding the power of the central government over substate actors and international institutions.

She is also interested in twentieth-century philosophy and has published on modern French, German, and Brazilian philosophy, focusing in particular on the legacy of structuralism and the tensions and intersections between metaphysics and structural analysis.

Concurrently revising “The Bourbon Ideology” into a book, she is working on two other projects: an edited volume on Walter Benjamin’s engagement with late medieval and early modern philosophy, and a second monograph project on Machiavelli’s reception in Latin America.

Costa has received funding from the Tinker Foundation, the Fulbright program, the Institute for Humane Studies, and numerous other programs and institutions. She is also an editor, interviewer, and contributor for the Journal of the History of Ideas’ online presence.

Courses: