Category Archives: Sunday Histories

Sunday histories – short essays on Progressive Geographies

Posted on February 2, 2025 by stuartelden

Updated June 2025: The full list of essays in this series is here. Over the past several years, my Progressive Geographies blog has become too much of a noticeboard, sharing information about books, talks or shorter pieces by other people … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories | 2 Comments

Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste

Posted on February 2, 2025 by stuartelden

The oldest texts preserved are inscriptions which date back about 5,000 years, though the dating is disputed, and how they should be read presents its own controversies. Most of the earliest texts are on tablets or in stone; with surviving … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Julia Kristeva, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Umberto Eco | 19 Comments

Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940): an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology

Posted on January 26, 2025 by stuartelden

One of the challenges with my current project on Indo-European thought in France is how male-dominated it is. If you look at a photograph of the professors of the Collège de France in 1967, you can perhaps see why. It wasn’t much better at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Antoine Meillet, Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Sunday Histories | 15 Comments

Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague

Posted on January 19, 2025 by stuartelden

There are some good histories of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, which met in the years before the Second World War, and which included Russian scholars as well as ones from Czechoslovakia. Jindřich Toman’s The Magic of a Common Language is a particularly … Continue reading →

Posted in Antoine Meillet, Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University

Posted on January 12, 2025 by stuartelden

For his initial trips to the United States, Michel Foucault was often invited by French departments. His visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972, and the first of his multiple visits to the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 … Continue reading →

Posted in Daniel Defert, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | 14 Comments

Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B

Posted on January 5, 2025 by stuartelden

In April 1956, at Gif-sur-Yvette just outside of Paris, the first meeting of the International Colloquium on Mycenaean texts took place. The proceedings of the conference, edited by Michel Lejeune, were published later that year as Études mycéniennes: Actes du Colloque international sur … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories | 16 Comments