My name is Stuart Elden and this is a site about politics, interesting books, my own writing and whatever else comes to mind.
I’m a Professor of Political Geography at Durham University, UK, with a training in politics, history and political theory. At Durham I am one of the Directors of the Institute of Advanced Study and the Academic Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit. From September 2013 I will be Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, in the Politics and International Studies department. In that role I will also be spending two months a year at the Centre for Urban Science and Progress - a partnership with New York University among others – and at Monash University as part of the Monash-Warwick Alliance.
My interests range fairly widely between philosophy, politics, geography, literature and history. I’m the author of four books and the editor of seven. My next book, The Birth of Territory, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. My articles have appeared in journals in a range of disciplines, and some have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Russian, Hebrew and Korean. You can find a list of future talks here and free downloads here. I am currently working on projects on Shakespeare, Foucault and concepts of the world and earth.
I also edit the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, which now has an open site parallel to the print and online journal. A book series is being launched with Sage in partnership with Pion in 2013. When I’m not working I enjoy cycling, watching cricket and a range of music.
Please note that while I welcome comments, they need to be accompanied by a valid email address. Comments using false email addresses, false names, multiple false identities from a single IP address, etc. will not be posted. I’d rather not have to turn comments off, but I will ‘trash’ anything inappropriate. In the Middle has a moderation policy that provides a good justification for the kind of comments I would like to see here.
Amazon.com page; Amazon.co.uk page
Nice blog, dude
Very good stuff, very interesting and amusing. Much better than facebook nonsense, for sure.
Great stuff! Looking forward to the Kant book.
Thanks for the material…
I have to write, but turned to reading, and I am not sorry….
I’ve known some of your texts, mainly the Focault and Heidegger book, Mapping the present, and have become very interested in your blog. I’m a Brazilian scholar doing my post-phd at University of Paris 7 and I’m very interested in getting information on Foucault’s colloquia and discussions. Hope we can meet personally sometime!
thanks for linking to continent. we hope you have a lovely new year!
Hi, is there any way for me to reach you? I am a filmmaker in New York and I wrote a screenplay that takes some ideas from Foucault, sort of exploring it from a “what if someone lived his life according to these ideas” starting point.
I would love to be able to establish contact with you, so here is my email –
cdstevensny@gmail.com
Thanks,
Crystal Stevens
Hi and congratulations for your website.
Does someone have a clue if Lefebvre’s ‘De l’Etat’ has been translated in English at all?
Thank you
There are some pieces and related materials in this collection http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/state-space-world
There are complexities with the rights which prevent a full English translation or, for the moment at least, even a reedition in French.
Congratulations! I nominated you for the Versatile Blogger Award and posted a link to your blog on my page. You have excellent posts here and I hope others will come, gain insights and be involved in discussions. (http://allthingsgeography1.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/versatile-blogger-award/)
Dear Stuart
I’ve had an opportunity to engage some of your works at a very basic Masters level and I must say that I find your writing and articulation of Lefebvre deeply satisfying. When do you think you’d have time to transport some of those ideas to help out budding scholars in Africa and South Africa to be precise, to make sense of the social, physical and capital world we’re experiencing? Particularly from the perspective of Rhythm-analysis.
Kind regards
Ernestina
Thanks Ernestina. I haven’t worked on Lefebvre for some time – the last was when Neil Brenner and I put together the State, Space, World collection and a related essays in 2007-2008. I don’t know what I could do around African questions in relation to his work, but I hope people find his ideas useful – I suspect the analysis of state mode of production and state spatial strategies would be at least as useful as Rhythmanalysis. I don’t know South Africa well – only visited twice – but I am beginning to do some work on Nigeria, and am visiting different parts of the African continent fairly regularly these days.
Stuart