On 16 June 2025 I gave a short talk with the title “Before California: Foucault’s Early Visits to the Americas”, to the Remembering/Forgetting Foucault: Reassessing a Critical Legacy workshop at the Maison Française, Oxford.

The audio recording of my talk is here

The piece draws on a forthcoming article for Foucault Studies, summarised here – Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth.

I say a little about Edward Said’s early work on Foucault, and about the importance of him and other commentators including Josué Harari in introducing him to an American audience. See the posts The Early Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Swift and Josué V. Harari, the Marquis de Sade, and Michel Foucault’s 1970 lectures in Buffalo. On Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University there is less known, but I outline what I’ve been able to find out about.