I’ve been doing a lot more work in archives in the United States for this project over the past few weeks. I had a few days up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was even colder than New York. There, I was able to see the small file of Ferdinand de Saussure papers at Harvard, and some things in the Maurice Blanchot papers relating to Émile Benveniste and Foucault. Harvard also have George Sarton’s archive, which includes some interesting correspondence with Alexandre Koyré. I also had a day at MIT, which has Roman Jakobson’s archive, which has some interesting material on different things, including correspondence. His correspondence with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Benveniste has been published, but not his interesting correspondence with Koyré. The MIT archive also has the complete manuscript of a very interesting radio interview which I’d seen in part in Paris, in the Tzvetan Todorov archive. 

In New York, I looked at the records of the New York Institute for the Humanities, at New York University. This was partly because of Foucault’s 1980 lecture with Richard Sennett, published as “Sexuality and Solitude”, and its related seminar. I write about that seminar, in particular the people who attended and the readings they did, here. The Institute also has a file of a lecture with the title ‘Roman Jakobson’. I had initially thought it might be a lecture by Jakobson, but it’s actually by Edmund Leach, given as a tribute a few months after Jakobson’s death. There is an audio recording here. I also had a morning at the New School, which has some material relating to Alexandre Koyré’s time teaching there. Following that and some other research, I wrote up a list of Koyré’s Wartime Teaching at the École Libre des Hautes Études and the New School, based on published traces and catalogues.

I made some more visits to the Columbia University archives, looking at some more Koyré correspondence, and some publisher archives. One file from the Zone books archive, on Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna had a completely unexpected claim about a translation of Foucault, which I will write about in a future ‘Sunday History’. [Update May 2025: It’s now available as Who translated Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things?] There is a lot more in the Columbia archives which I’m planning to look at, particularly relating to one moment in the career of Roman Jakobson.

While I’m based in the United States, I’m trying to complete the archival work here for this project, but also to gather some material for a future project or two. For various reasons it’s unclear when I’ll next have much time here. I should be back in New England in the autumn, but I’m not sure how long I’ll have on that trip. So, with that in mind, I’ve also been making a lot of requests to other archives, to get a sense of the scope of some of their collections and whether material can be scanned or if I need to visit. My experience is that after the pandemic restrictions, many more archives are open to making things available than before. There seems to be no obvious logic as to whether this is done free of charge (for fairly small amounts), nominal fees, or quite a lot – $1 a page can quickly add up. But overall, it is working out well and I’m more than happy to pay to save on travel. But there is some stuff I still want to see in person – the materiality of stuff can still be interesting.

Earlier this month I gave a talk at the University at Buffalo about this project, on “French Theory and the Indo-Europeans”. Luke Folk and Krzysztof Ziarek invited me, and it was very good to meet them and their colleagues, including Roger Woodard, with whom I’ve been speaking about this project for a while, but not previously met. While I was in Buffalo I worked through the material they have in their Special Collections about Foucault’s 1970 and 1972 visits there. Leonhard Riep has written a short and very interesting piece on Foucault’s 1972 lecture course in Buffalo, for which a series of recordings exist. Leonhard’s piece is due to be published in Foucault Studies later this year, and I’ll share a link when it’s up. The 1972 course is due for publication in the Vrin series edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, with this volume edited by Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera. This course, whose final title was “Histoire de la verité”, uses material from Foucault’s first two Collège de France courses, but one reason for its importance is that those courses had to be edited on the basis of the manuscripts, since there were no recordings. The recordings of the Buffalo lectures really help fill in our sense of this material. There are also a couple of recordings which are probably from the 1970 course, and a lot of correspondence and other material relating to the visits. I have written a short essay about this material, which will be in the Foucault Studies ‘Buffalo dossier’ along with Leonhard’s piece. I’ll share a shorter summary on this site soon [Update May 2025: now available here].

I have upcoming trips to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, a return to the New York Public Library, this time to the Berg collection, and more time at Columbia University. Further ahead, I’m going to Chicago in April to take an initial look at the Mircea Eliade papers. As well as the Buffalo lecture, I presented on some of the work at the Remarque Institute at NYU in one of their lunchtime seminars on ‘Benveniste in the Second World War’. I’ll be giving one more short talk at Remarque in April at an event on ‘Troubling Classical Bodies’ along with Anurima Banerji and Brooke Holmes. You can join that one remotely on Zoom. I’ll be speaking about Benveniste and Sogdian. [Update May 2025: the video of the event is here and the text of my talk here.]

I recently put the audio recordings of two talks on this project up on this site.

– “Indo-European Thought at the Collège de France”, Social Anthropology research seminar, University of St Andrews, 29 November 2024 (audio)

– “The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans”, Future of Ideologies webinar, University of Nottingham, 29 January 2025 (audio) – this is a shorter version of the St Andrews talk, with a little additional material.

I’ve been continuing the series of ‘Sunday Histories’ posts on research relating to this project in some way, though sometimes at a bit of a tangent. Some of these relate to Alexandre Koyré, who is tangentially connected to the Indo-European project, but who might become a focus of future work. It’s hard to know how these short pieces are landing with people, and social media is unpredictable as a means of dissemination. But I hope there is some interest in them. The most recent which are not linked above are on Ernst Kantorowicz and the California Loyalty Oath; about Walter Henning’s project of a Khwarezmian Dictionary; a discussion of the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Koyré; and on Hannah Arendt, David Farrell Krell and the early English translations of Heidegger. I have some ideas for future pieces on Koyré, Foucault, Jakobson, Nabokov, Benveniste and territory. The full list is here.

Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is now available open access. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career, and is currently available free to access. My article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” was published in the Journal of the History of Ideas last year (ask if you’d like a copy) and “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” is now published (open access).