Stuart Elden

@stuartelden.bsky.social

9.7K followers 1.2K following 1.5K posts

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

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Political science 41%

Sociology 31%

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Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 1d

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roger Caillois – Race, Games and a Ceremonial Sword
progressivegeographies.com/2025/12/28/c...

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roger Caillois – Race, Games and a Ceremonial Sword

Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss both spent the war in exile from France. Lévi-Strauss had done fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, but when he left France he went through Martinique and was de…

progressivegeographies.com

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 13h

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.

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 15h

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.

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 18h

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 18h

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

Cover of book with two white globes on purple background and title vertically on the right side.

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 1d

The 52nd essay of a weekly series through 2025 - progressivegeographies.com/future-proje...

Sunday histories

Over the past few years, Progressive Geographies has become too much of a noticeboard, sharing information about books, talks or shorter pieces by other people that look interesting, and, much less…

progressivegeographies.com

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 2d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 3d

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

Reposted by Stuart Elden, Andrew Jacobs

Isabel Köster @iotasubscript.bsky.social · 4d

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

Reposted by Martin Paul Eve, Margot C. Finn

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 4d

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...

A photograph of Foucault sitting at a desk with bookshelves behind and a typewriter and papers in front of him. There is a large old-fashioned lampshade above him.

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 4d

The music I enjoyed this year, either bought in physical form, often through @burningshed.com, or digitally through @bandcamp.com
progressivegeographies.com/2025/12/25/m...

My favourite music of 2025

The music I enjoyed this year, either bought in physical form, often through Burning Shed, or digitally through bandcamp. A photo of some of the cds in this list Beat, Neon Heat Disease: Live Biosc…

progressivegeographies.com

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 5d

Books received - Davy, Luyssen, Deleuze, Lévi-Strauss and Dreyfus, Derrida
progressivegeographies.com/2025/12/24/b...

Books received – Davy, Luyssen, Deleuze, Lévi-Strauss and Dreyfus, Derrida

Some second-hand or new French books, including Johanna Luyssen, Les Fragments d’Hélène, Deleuze’s Sur l’appareil d’État et la machine de guerre: Cours novembre 1979-mars 1980 and Sur Spinoza…

progressivegeographies.com

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 5d

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

Reposted by Daniel Ziblatt, Anna O. Law, Jan W. Mueller , and 10 more Daniel Ziblatt, Anna O. Law, Jan W. Mueller, David Brady, Stuart Elden, Efrén O. Pérez, Robert C. Richards, Markus Wagner, Dana R. Fisher, Federica Genovese, Pepper D. Culpepper, Nathan P. Kalmoe, David Stark

Anna Grzymala-Busse @annagbusse.bsky.social · 6d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 6d

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

A photograph of the four books mentioned in the post - Noam Leshem, Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land, the reedition of Stefan Arviddson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology As Ideology and Science, Henri Natter and Adam Réfrégier and Five Years Behind Hitler’s Barbed Wire: A Diary of French Officers in a German Prison Camp, 1940-1945 and Melissa Pawelski, Languages of Punishment: Translating Foucault into English and German.

Reposted by John Hogan

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 6d

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

Reposted by Stuart Elden, Mark Rice

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 7d

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

Neil Stewart @neilstewart.bsky.social · 7d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 7d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 7d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 7d

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

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 8d

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...

A page of handwritten notes by Foucault - details in the above post and available at https://eman-archives.org/Foucault-fiches/items/show/7471

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 8d

On the Trail of a Misplaced Reference in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic progressivegeographies.com/2025/12/21/o...

On the Trail of a Misplaced Reference in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic

In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault quotes a passage which he incorrectly references to “S.A.D. Tissot, Avis aux gens de lettres sur leur santé, Lausanne, 1767, p. 28”. As part of the work for the new…

progressivegeographies.com

Reposted by Stuart Elden

Ed Wall @eddwall.bsky.social · 9d

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...

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 9d

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

Cover of book with blue and black text on cream background and wrapper with 'Deleuze 100 ans' and photo of him teaching

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 9d

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_...

Cover of book with blue and black text on cream cover (with wrapper with 'Deleuze 100 ans' and photo of Deleuze speaking)

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 9d

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-...