My PhD thesis was entitled ‘Mapping the Present: Space and History in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault’ and it was submitted in December 1998 (I’m pretty sure it was on the 18th). It was examined in April 1999 by Michael Dillon and Kevin Hetherington, and was supervised primarily by Mark Neocleous, and in its early stages by David Wootton and Barbara Goodwin.

The PhD became my first book, Mapping the Present, with some fairly minor revisions – I dropped the chapter on Nietzsche and incorporated some parts of that elsewhere (and then, much later, reworked the remaining material into a book chapter); and rewrote the introduction and conclusion. But while doing the PhD I also wrote a long paper on Lefebvre, which didn’t get used in the thesis, but was a very early version of parts of what became my second book, Understanding Henri Lefebvre. And I’ve only half-jokingly referred to my third book, Speaking Against Number, as a proper answer to a question Mick Dillon asked me in the viva.

For the Foucault’s Last Decade project I’m now returning to materials I last worked on while writing the PhD, though with a very different focus. But it’s interesting to think back to where I was fifteen years ago today.