Category Archives: Sunday Histories

How Literary Agents Made Italian Publishing Transnational: An Interview with Anna Ferrando

Posted on August 15, 2025 by stuartelden

How Literary Agents Made Italian Publishing Transnational: An Interview with Anna Ferrando – Journal of the History of Ideas blog with Rose Facchini Anna Ferrando is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, Publishing, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France: A Structural Analysis of the Wolverine in North American Mythology

Posted on August 10, 2025 by stuartelden

In the 1949-50 academic year, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave the Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France. He was hoping to get elected to a chair there at this time, and behind the scenes various people were lobbying for this to … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sunday Histories | 4 Comments

A postcard to Arne Furumark from the 1956 Mycenaean Studies conference

Posted on August 8, 2025 by stuartelden

Looking for something else, I chanced upon a postcard to Arne Furumark, available online, signed by the participants at the 1956 Mycenaean Studies conference outside of Paris, which I talk about here. Among the names are the decipherers of Linear B, … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Sunday Histories | 4 Comments

Herman Lommel and the ancient Aryans – Hegel’s great-grandson, Saussure translator and his links to Benveniste, Dumézil and Wikander

Posted on August 3, 2025 by stuartelden

In Mitra-Varuna in 1940, Georges Dumézil mentions the equation of Ahura-Mazdāh and Varuna, which he says was a “hypothesis, long accepted without argument”, but which “has subsequently been hotly disputed – wrongly, in my belief”, and that “on this point I regret … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course

Posted on July 27, 2025 by stuartelden

In 1965, Émile Benveniste published “Structure des relations d’auxiliarité” in Acta Linguistica Hafniensia – a journal founded by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Its initial editors were Viggo Brøndal and Louis Hjelmslev. Although the journal had been founded in 1939, and published five … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre and the translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Posted on July 20, 2025 by stuartelden

This is a revised, expanded and more fully referenced version of a post from March 2024. There is a Spanish translation of the earlier version here. Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, given at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré, Emmanuel Levinas, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil, Hannah Arendt, Henri Lefebvre, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Stefanos Geroulanos, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Two Greek Words for Kings and the Question of Territory: Wanax, Basileus and Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire

Posted on July 13, 2025 by stuartelden

In his Vocabulaire, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, Émile Benveniste mentions some questions relating to spatiality and territory that I have briefly surveyed here. One question he raised I said was worthy of further attention. In his French text, and its English … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Sunday Histories, Territory, The Birth of Territory | 4 Comments

Eugenio Donato and “The Structuralist Controversy” conference – proceedings, recordings, Foucault and Flaubert

Posted on July 6, 2025 by stuartelden

The 18-21 October 1966 Baltimore conference on structuralism has long been recognised as important for the reception of French theory in the United States. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Pierre Vernant were some of … Continue reading →

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, René Girard, Sunday Histories | 5 Comments

Six Months of ‘Sunday Histories’ – weekly short essays on Progressive Geographies

Posted on June 30, 2025 by stuartelden

At the beginning of 2025 I decided to try to post a short essay each week on Progressive Geographies. I felt the blog had become too much of a noticeboard, sharing information about interesting books, talks or shorter pieces by … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré, Edward Said, Emile Benveniste, Erwin Panofsky, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Hyppolite, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Territory, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Leonard Robert Palmer, Elisabeth/Elizabeth Palmer and the “Studies in General Linguistics” series – a note on the English editors and translators of André Martinet and Émile Benveniste

Posted on June 29, 2025 by stuartelden

Leonard Robert Palmer (1906-1984) was a British linguist, important both for his own work and as an editor. Early in his career he taught Classics at the Victoria University of Manchester, became Chair of Greek at King’s College London, and from … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories | 4 Comments