Comparative Literature

Michele Moghrabi

michele_moghrabi@brown.edu
Research Interests Ancient Greek philosophy, tragedy, and medicine, Medieval Christian and Islamic reception of Greek thought, Galenic medicine, 19th century experimental psychology, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenological and Daseinanalytic psychologies
German idealism, 20th century existential thought, 20th century continental philosophy, Marxist analysis of financial economies and derivatives markets

Biography

Michele Moghrabi was raised between France and Italy before starting university in the US. His dissertation research attempts to trace a genealogy of ‘diseases of the soul’. Starting in a web of Ancient Greek philosophy, medicine, and tragedy, he hopes to explore how the very birth of the notion of a ’soul’ or ‘psyche’ shifted the Greek conception of madness away from an illness that is the product of external possession, and toward a true disease of the order of this nascent temporal entity conceived to be the soul. Tracing the development of conceptions of mental illness in the Medieval reception of Greek literature (particularly in Galen), Michele hopes to show the culmination of this tradition to be in 20th century psychoanalysis. Emphasizing alternative psychoanalytic traditions in phenomenology and existentialism, he hopes to show how the Greek birth of the thinking of ‘disease of the soul’ comes full-circle in a psychoanalytic tradition that, in its deeply Greek inheritance,  strives to conceive of psychopathologies as dysfunctions in the psyche’s distinctively temporal order. 

Education:

B.A. with Honors in Philosophy, The University of Chicago, 2019
M.A. with Distinction in Philosophy, DePaul University, 2022  

Languages:

English, Italian, French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek

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