Stuart Elden is a professor of geography and political theory at Warwick University (UK) and Monash University (Australia). His fearsome appetite for hard books is charted at his blog Progressive Geographies*, which also includes all sorts of useful resources, from bibliographies on Boko Haram and the Ebola crisis to compilations of material by and about Foucault and Lefebvre.

He’s also recently published a Big Book: The Birth of Territory, a history of a key concept in political geography from the classical to the early modern period. I’ve just bought a copy: some of my current research on refugee camps involves thinking about them in the Foucauldian terms of population and territory that Elden explores. (I’ll be reading a lot more work in geography over the next few years, I suspect.) It’ll be interesting to see what impact it has in history departments, but it’s already made a splash…