Eraldo Souza dos Santos. Photo by Han Parker
Philosopher and Poetic Justice Cluster hire Eraldo Souza dos Santos joins CLS faculty
The 60th anniversary of the official announcement of a “War on Crime” in the United States was recently marked. Shortly after unveiling the “War on Poverty,” President Lyndon Johnson on March 8, 1965, declared the War on Crime, arguing lawlessness was hindering the country’s progress. Six decades later, UC Irvine and the School of Social Ecology has a new scholar who can put the War on Crime in context.
He's Eraldo Souza dos Santos, who this month joins the faculty as an assistant professor of criminology, law & society (CLS).
“I have been writing a book on the history of the idea of civil disobedience in the U.S., especially the moment when both liberals and conservatives appropriated the idea during the so-called ‘War on Crime’ in the late 1960s and the beginning of the ‘70s,” dos Santos revealed during a recent interview.
His path to the CLS department was both poetic and philosophical—literally.
Dos Santos received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil in 2013. He earned Master of Arts degrees in philosophy in 2015 from Charles University in the Czech Republic and Germany’s Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He attained his doctorate in philosophy from l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne last July, and this month dos Santos completes his Klarman Fellowship in Government from New York’s Cornell University.
“I applied for multiple jobs, as always, and, interestingly, I wasn't expecting to be hired for this one,” he confides. “But I was hired by the Poetic Justice Cluster.”
The goal of UCI’s Black Thriving Initiative and Faculty Cluster Hiring in Poetic Justice is to attract researchers innovating how the racial effects of slavery, segregation and mass incarceration are studied, and are leading community-based activities that support the economic and cultural well-being of Black communities in Southern California and beyond.
Dos Santos has a fellow CLS faculty member who was a Poetic Justice Cluster hire: Associate Professor Mercy Romero, who joined the School of Social Ecology department in 2023. But his introduction to UC Irvine came decades earlier thanks to two famous French philosophers. Jacques Derrida taught in the UCI Humanities Department from 1986 until shortly before his death in 2004, and Jean-François Lyotard followed his intellectual friend to Irvine in 1987 and taught part-time here through 1994. He died four years later.
“You know, this is a very important university for people like me who are philosophers,” dos Santos says. “I did my Ph.D. in France, and everyone in France knows UC Irvine because philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard were professors here.”
He adds that he is “very excited to be part of the community” because of the history and importance of philosophy as a discipline at UC Irvine.
Dos Santos will teach classes that address what civil disobedience is (“Especially if you're an activist, that's the class for you,” he promises) and what German scholars call “militant democracy,” which the assistant professor defined as “the idea that you can suspend fundamental rights to protect democracy.”
Fun Fact
Asked for a fun fact about himself, dos Santos could very well have ticked off the five languages he speaks—English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. But he chose to emphasize the fun.
“I love artistic gymnastics,” he answered excitedly, “and I practice it as well.”
— Matt Coker