Category Archives: Sunday Histories

Louis Althusser’s 1967-68 course on ‘philosophy for scientists’ – the resulting publications and the archive of its lectures

Posted on June 4, 2025 by stuartelden

Louis Althusser’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) are of course best known for the famous Reading Capital volume, which developed from his 1964-65 seminar. He ran seminars on the young Marx in 1961-62 and Lacan and psychoanalysis in 1963-64. I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Georges Canguilhem, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Roman Jakobson, Franz Boas, and the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library

Posted on June 1, 2025 by stuartelden

The support for refugee scholars to come to the United States of America in the 1930s and 1940s is well known. Varian Fry famously helped several hundred European artists and intellectuals to flee Vichy France between 1940 and 1941. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Kantorowicz, Jean Wahl, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

The Early Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Swift

Posted on May 25, 2025 by stuartelden

Given all his other achievements, Edward Said’s role in bringing Foucault’s work to an anglophone audience is perhaps understated today. His 1971 essay “Abecedarium culturae”, in Northwestern’s literary journal TriQuarterly was a significant piece on so-called “structuralism”, and the following year’s “Michel … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France update 28: archives in Princeton, Chicago and final work in New York

Posted on May 20, 2025 by stuartelden

I’ve continued my work with archives in the USA over the past several weeks. Some of this has been in relation to the Indo-European Thought project, but I’ve managed to work on some peripheral things too.I had two days in Princeton, … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Edward Said, Emile Benveniste, Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Dumézil, Jacques Derrida, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Mircea Eliade, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Vladimir Nabokov | 1 Comment

Alexandre Koyré in Cairo

Posted on May 18, 2025 by stuartelden

This is a revised and expanded version of a post from September 2024 Alexandre Koyré’s teaching career was predominantly in Paris and the United States. Born in Russia, he studied in Paris and Germany, before beginning teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The Murder of Ioan Culianu – Eliade, Anton, Eco, Lincoln and the University of Chicago

Posted on May 11, 2025 by stuartelden

The story sounds like a detective novel or a spy thriller. A professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago is shot at close range in the third-floor bathroom of Swift Hall in 1991. The killing is … Continue reading →

Posted in Mircea Eliade, Sunday Histories, Umberto Eco, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, and The Song of Igor – other sources for the story of a failed collaboration

Posted on May 4, 2025 by stuartelden

In a previous piece on Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel and The Song of Igor, I outlined the story of a planned collaborative edition and English translation of the Slavic epic The Song of Igor. This is a text of disputed … Continue reading →

Posted in Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, Vladimir Nabokov | 8 Comments

Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee’

Posted on April 27, 2025 by stuartelden

This was written for an event on ‘Troubling Classical Bodies‘ at the Remarque Institute at New York University on 11 April 2025. My thanks to Stefanos Geroulanos and Brooke Holmes for the invitation to give this short talk, and to … Continue reading →

Posted in Antoine Meillet, Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Richard III or Edward III? A small historical error in Foucault’s History of Madness – and his attempt to correct it

Posted on April 24, 2025 by stuartelden

There is a small historical error in Foucault’s History of Madness, which endures through the different French versions with the exception of Oeuvres, but which is corrected in one of the English versions. Yes, there are other errors, but I’m focused on … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, William Shakespeare | 4 Comments

Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth

Posted on April 20, 2025 by stuartelden

I have discussed Foucault’s two visits to Buffalo before. First, most briefly, in Foucault: The Birth of Power (2017). In that book, which is on the first half of the 1970s, I simply indicated that Foucault gave some lectures in Buffalo (pp. … Continue reading →

Posted in Foucault: The Birth of Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 19 Comments