The Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture – “Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions”, Brown University, 22 October 2025, 5.30pm

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions, a lecture presented by Stuart Elden from the University of Warwick. This event will take place Wednesday, October 22, at 5:30 PM at the Brown Faculty Club.

The French linguist Émile Benveniste’s final book was the two-volume Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, recently republished as the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society. Published in 1969, shortly before a stroke put an end to Benveniste’s active career, the book was based on a series of lectures at the Collège de France. It is one of the crowning glories of the rich vein of post-war French research on Indo-European mythology and linguistics, alongside the work of Georges Dumézil.

Existing accounts of Benveniste’s life give only the basic outline of his experiences in the Second World War. He was mobilised in 1939, captured in 1940, escaped in 1941, moved to the unoccupied zone, crossed the border to Switzerland in 1943, and returned to Paris after the Liberation. He lost his chair at the Collège de France because he was Jewish, but regained it in 1944. His brother was arrested in Paris, and deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. But much of this time remains obscure, and any impact on Benveniste’s work is rarely mentioned or even explicitly denied.

Using archives in Paris, Geneva, Fribourg, Berne, London and Cambridge this lecture reconstructs this period of his life, and how immediately after his return to Paris he began a series of courses with the same title as the book. The surviving teaching materials show how he moved to much more explicitly political themes in his work at this time. Tracing the making of the book, this talk shows how his war-time experiences provide a valuable context to this important and influential study.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of books including The Birth of Territory(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and a four-volume intellectual history of Michel Foucault’s entire career (Polity, 2016-2023). He is currently writing a history of Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, focusing on Émile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil, funded by a Leverhulme Trust major research fellowship.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!