Category Archives: Uncategorized

Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France update 32 – trying to improve a draft

As I said in the last update, I went to the EUI in Florence at the beginning of February with a nearly complete draft of my manuscript on Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, and had the plan to leave at the … Continue reading

Posted in Étienne Wolff, Emile Benveniste, Fernand Braudel, Georges Dumézil, Julia Kristeva, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories, Travel, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Julia Kristeva’s portrait of Émile Benveniste in The Samurai

Julia Kristeva’s first novel The Samurai was published in 1990. It’s not the greatest novel, but it’s well known that the book is a thinly disguised autobiography, with the central character Olga Morena modelled on herself. Many of the famous names of … Continue reading

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Julia Kristeva, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Christian Henderson, Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System – Cambridge University Press, February 2026 and New Books discussion

Christian Henderson, Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System – Cambridge University Press, February 2026 In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by … Continue reading

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Liv Ingeborg Lied and Brent Nongbri, Working with Manuscripts: A Guide for Textual Scholars – Yale University Press, April 2025

Liv Ingeborg Lied and Brent Nongbri, Working with Manuscripts: A Guide for Textual Scholars – Yale University Press, April 202 A first-of-its-kind handbook outlining best practices and common pitfalls for students and textual scholars interested in beginning to work with manuscripts While manuscripts … Continue reading

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Morgan Golf-French, Race, Culture, and Politics in German Historical Thought, 1785-1815 – Oxford University Press, May 2026

Morgan Golf-French, Race, Culture, and Politics in German Historical Thought, 1785-1815 – Oxford University Press, May 2026 In this book, Morgan Golf-French offers a new interpretation of late Enlightenment German historiography in relation to ideas about race, culture, and politics. … Continue reading

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New John Berger editions from Verso – The Moment of Cubism, Landscapes, Corker’s Freedom and Goya’s Last Portrait/A Question of Geography (with Nella Bielski)

Today we welcome four new titles into our Essential John Berger series: The Moment of Cubism – One of Berger’s most important collections of art criticism wherein he suggests that Cubism was a moment rather than a movement and makes a case … Continue reading

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Saffron O’Neill, The Visual Life of Climate Change – Bristol University Press, December 2025 (print and open access)

Saffron O’Neill, The Visual Life of Climate Change – Bristol University Press, December 2025 (print and open access) Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Images can play a key role in communication – but climate change imagery can be … Continue reading

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Nicolas Guilhot, Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession – Harvard University Press, October 2026

Nicolas Guilhot, Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession – Harvard University Press, October 2026 Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. Nicolas Guilhot, however, challenges us to … Continue reading

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Hannah Arendt, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Georges Redard and the Linguistic Atlas of Iranian Speakers

After Émile Benveniste suffered a major stroke in late 1969, his former student and friend Georges Redard planned to publish some of Benveniste’s incomplete projects. Redard was by this time teaching at the University of Bern in Switzerland. One volume … Continue reading

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Harriet Hawkins, “Lithic Lives: Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones”, 9th Cosgrove Lecture, Royal Holloway, 11 May 2026

Harriet Hawkins, “Lithic Lives: Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones“, 9th Cosgrove Lecture, Royal Holloway, 11 May 2026 A fragment of ruby, a hand-written list of sapphire sales from February 1918, a much-loved pop song crooned during Cambodia’s … Continue reading

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