Stuart Elden
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stuartelden.bsky.social
Stuart Elden
@stuartelden.bsky.social

Political theorist, political geographer, now mainly write on the history of ideas. Professor at University of Warwick, work on territory, Foucault, Lefebvre and new project on Indo-European thought in C20th France. https://progressivegeographies.com .. more

Political science 41%
Sociology 31%

It depends, and hard to say precisely. Once I have an idea, maybe 2-3 hours of writing, but then there is usually more to check, something to read, etc. which varies a lot. I usually have a few in development at the same time, and add bits in and around other research.

Thanks Simone. This year was a bit of a writing experiment - could I commit to a weekly essay, not just written but shared. Usually I continually edit, cut and rework things into much longer pieces. But this year the posts went out on a regular rhythm. But it's about 100,000 words in these pieces.

Two Foucault reissues from @Polity -
Language, Madness and Desire: On Literature
www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
Speech Begins After Death, both translated by Robert Bononno
www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature
Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relati...
www.politybooks.com

@eddwall.bsky.social, Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit From Destruction and Reconstruction - Jovis, December 2025 www.jovis.de/en/book/9783...

Melissa Adler, Surveillance in the Empire of Liberty: Why Thomas Jefferson Matters in Our Information Age - @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social January 2026
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/surveilla...
Surveillance in the Empire of Liberty
Examines the formation of a surveillance state through a close examination of Thomas Jefferson's plantation management techniques and political actions. With th…
www.bloomsbury.com

The Logic of Fantasy: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV – ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price, @politybooks.bsky.social , April 2026 www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
The Logic of Fantasy: : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV
The Logic of Fantasy: : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV, 'Logic of the fantasy': the expression recurs throughout the Seminar as a leitmotif, yet not a single lesson is devoted to it; not even ...
www.politybooks.com
A Christmas surprise: if you want to download the open access copy of Stealing from the Gods, you now can... The official birthday is in a couple of weeks, but time is an arbitrary construct. (Oh, and we'll be PA6029.T46 K67 2026 at the library. An actual real call number!)
Stealing from the Gods
Stealing from the Gods investigates how authors writing between the first century BCE and second century CE addressed the issue of temple robbery or sacrilegium. As a self-proclaimed empire of pious p...
press.umich.edu
Foucault’s Christmas - "a Christmas day without writing, that was impossible! ... a day when, as he said, 'nothing has happened for several thousand years' " progressivegeographies.com/2024/12/25/f...

Gary Slater, Lisa Landoe Hedrick eds. Ethics Across Borders:
Reimagining Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides – Routledge, December 2025
www.routledge.com/Ethics-Acros...
Ethics Across Borders: Reimagining Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides
Ethics Across Borders assembles perspectives from geographers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and scientists to explore ethically relevant connections across multiple types of borders. The con...
www.routledge.com
Just in time for Christmas: a great interview with an absolute legend.

Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta on her career, US politics, the erosion of democracy, and most of all, what to do about it.

sociologica.unibo.it/article/view...
View of Theda Skocpol in Conversation with Edwin Amenta on Sociology, Political Science, Higher Education, and U.S. Politics | Sociologica
sociologica.unibo.it

Books received - Leshem, Arviddson, Natter and Réfrégier, Pawelski
progressivegeographies.com/2025/12/23/b...

Reposted by John Hogan

Katie Donington, Abdul Mohamud, Robin Whitburn and Nicholas
Draper, Teaching Slavery: New Approaches to Britain’s Colonial Past – @uclpress.bsky.social, November 2025 (print and open access)
uclpress.co.uk/book/teachin...
Teaching Slavery
Teaching Slavery offers ground-breaking research and practical guidance for teaching Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery. Combining historical analysis with classroom strategies, it equips educato...
uclpress.co.uk
The sheer recalcitrance of diverse materials to the homogenizing process required both by digitization and processing by means of AI means one thing: the digitization is not the archive.

sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
On Exactitude in Science; Or, No, Full Digitization of Every Archive Is Not the Point — Sonja Drimmer
In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Cesares published a short story called “Del Rigor en la Ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”) The story, which you can read in the original magazine context ...
sonjadrimmer.com

Reposted by Stuart Elden

We at the @ihr.bsky.social put an interview with Christopher Hill online earlier this year www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
Interviews with Historians - Christopher Hill
Christopher Hill interviewed by Penelope Corfield, part of the Interviews with Historians collection.
www.history.ac.uk

Michael Braddick, Christopher Hill: The life of a Radical Historian - @versobooks.bsky.social, February 2025
www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...
I've shared the book before, but there is now a @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social discussion with Lucas Tse
newbooksnetwork.com/christopher-...
Christopher Hill
Christopher Hill was one of the leading historians of his generation. His work across more than fifteen books and dozens of articles fundamentally rewrote the way we understand the English Revolution ...
www.versobooks.com

Reposted by Vicki Squire

One of the pieces included in this list - progressivegeographies.com/resources/wo...

Michaela Fišerová and Jakub Mácha eds. Metaphysics and
Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking – Routledge, January 2026
www.routledge.com/Metaphysics-...
Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking
This volume offers a fresh and timely contribution to current discussions of ornamentation, repetition, and affect in aesthetics and philosophy. It provides new insights into how ornamentation shapes ...
www.routledge.com

The page of notes by Foucault from his preparation for this book, which are discussed in the above piece, is available here - eman-archives.org/Foucault-fic...

Reposted by Stuart Elden

Architecture for Warfare came out this week. While much of my writing speculates optimistically at the possibilities of landscape and architectural practice, this research funded by the Graham Foundation, examines some of the limits. www.jovis.de/en/book/9783...

And Sur les lignes de vie, Cours mai-juin 1980
www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/livre-Sur_le...

After Sur la peinture (2023, translated as On Painting) and Sur Spinoza (2024), David Lapoujade has edited two more volumes of Gilles Deleuze's teaching, with Éditions de Minuit:
Sur l'appareil d'État et la machine de guerre: Cours novembre 1979-mars 1980
www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/livre-Sur_l_...

Ana Maria Albulescu, Third-Party Mediation and Peace
Processes in the Post-Soviet Space: Norms, Interests and Power – Routledge,
December 2025
www.routledge.com/Third-Party-...
Third-Party Mediation and Peace Processes in the Post-Soviet Space: Norms, Interests and Power
This book examines the success of third-party mediation in conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Third-party mediation is the subject of an extensive literature dealing with the resolution of internal c...
www.routledge.com

Philip Janzen, An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean - @dukepress.bsky.social, June 2025
www.dukeupress.edu/an-unformed-...
@newbooksnetwork.bsky.social discussion with Elisa Prosperetti
newbooksnetwork.com/philip-janze...
An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean
www.dukeupress.edu

Jacques Derrida, Témoigner: Séminaire (1992-1993) – eds. Peggy Kamuf and David Wills, Seuil, November 2025
www.seuil.com/ouvrage/temo...
Sciences humaines
Témoigner, Jacques Derrida : Des fantômes hantent ces pages, les fantômes de témoins disparus
www.seuil.com

Theresa Delgadillo, Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas - @uofmpress.bsky.social, September 2024
press.umich.edu/Books/G/Geog...
@newbooksnetwork.bsky.social discussion with Shodona Kettle
newbooksnetwork.com/geographies-...
Geographies of Relation
Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting socia...
press.umich.edu