Gilda Rocha de Melo e Sousa (March 24, 1919 – December 25, 2005), also spelled Gilda Rocha de Mello e Souza, was a Brazilian philosopher, literary critic, essayist, and university professor.
She then helped found the cultural magazine Clima, alongside her future husband Antonio Candido and other young intellectuals of the era.[1][2][3] In 1952, she received a doctorate in social sciences, with a thesis on 19th-century fashion, and in 1954 she became the founding director of the teaching of aesthetics at USP's Philosophy Department.[1][3] She would go on to direct the department from 1969 to 1972, a period of significant repression of academics under the military dictatorship.[1][3] In her time as an academic, she was particularly interested in studying the work of Mário de Andrade, with her publications including the central study O Tupi e o Alaúde on his Macunaíma.[1][4]
After retiring in 1973, in 1999 she was named professor emerita in the USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Humanities.[1]
She married the critic and sociologist Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza in 1943, and the couple had three children.[1][2] Gilda de Melo e Souza died in 2005, at age 86, at São Paulo's Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.[1][2] In 2014, professor Walnice Nogueira Galvão published A palavra afiada, a collection of some of de Melo e Sousa's interviews, letters, and writings.[1][4]
