Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Rebecca De Souza, Tulane University

Rebecca De Souza

Assistant Professor
Reveal Email Address

Education

DPhil, University of Oxford
MA by Research, University of Nottingham
BA (Hons), University of Oxford

Biography

Rebecca De Souza is an Assistant Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department with a joint appointment in the MENA program. She previously worked at the University of Stirling, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the University of Oxford, where she completed her PhD (DPhil) in 2021. She is currently co-editor-in-chief of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Her research focuses on the literary and cultural legacy of al-Andalus and the Middle Ages more broadly in Spain, North Africa, and Latin America. Her first monograph, Memories of Colonisation in Medieval and Modern Castile: Rereading and Refashioning al-Andalus (OUP, 2024), examines how Iberian literary works from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century reinvent the tenth-century Andalusi Golden Age to interrogate contemporary colonial projects. Her work has appeared in journals such as La corónica, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and postmedieval, amongst other venues.

Her research interest in global memories of the Middle Ages informs her current book projects, (1) Re-enacting Premodern Pasts in Latin America: Fantasy, Identity, and Community (under contract with Arc Humanities Press) and (2) a comparative study of Sephardic and morisco poetry in early modern Morocco and Tunisia. Rebecca is also interested in how representations of paganism or non-monotheistic belief systems shaped ideas about race and religion in premodern Iberia. She is co-editing the collection of essays A Companion to the Other Medieval Spanish Epic with Geraldine Hazbun (forthcoming with Brill in 2027).

Selected Publications