Projects

Current and recent work is on these projects.

Foucault

Between 2013 and 2022 I researched and wrote what became a four-part study of Foucault’s entire career with Polity Press. The books were written effectively as two pairs – starting with the final part of Foucault’s career and moving backwards as the archive opened up and more of his posthumous publications became available. Foucault’s Last Decade was published in April 2016 and Foucault: The Birth of Power in January 2017; The Early Foucault in June 2021 and The Archaeology of Foucault in early 2023.

You can read more about the books on a dedicated page here, which has part of the proposals, links to updates on the book’s research and writing, some recordings of talks and links to interviews and discussions.

I was funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme small grant to conduct archival work for the second pair of books.

A side project on Georges Canguilhem led to a book in Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series, published in early 2019 (more details here).

Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France

The next major project will be a study of Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, looking at both French and émigré scholars, with a particular focus on Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mircea Eliade and the early work of Julia Kristeva. The project is funded by a Leverhulme major research fellowship to run from October 2022 to September 2025. I have also edited a critical edition of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Concepts of Sovereignty for HAU books, which is due for publication in 2024.

I have written some pieces on the relation between Foucault and Dumézil, including a book chapter on sovereignty in the Handbook on Governmentality, and a forthcoming article in Journal of the History of Ideas on Foucault’s use of Dumézil’s work on antiquity. A piece on the relations between Foucault’s three mentors Canguilhem, Dumézil, and Hyppolite is forthcoming in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Some related pieces are in progress. 

Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic

Together with Stefanos Geroulanos (NYU), I will be editing a new translation and critical edition of Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic.

This will be a translation by Marie Satya McDonough of the 1972 second edition of Naissance de la clinique; all the variant passages from the 1963 first edition in notes; checked, completed and corrected references; some supplementary material by Foucault and others; and an editorial introduction.

Other recent work includes the following:

Shakespearean Territories

Shakespearean Territories was published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2018. It uses a number of plays to think through various aspects of the question of territory. Early versions of the chapters on King Lear and Coriolanuswere published separately, and I gave lectures on most other parts of the book, including on Hamlet, King John, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry IV, Part I. More details including links to online material here.

I have also been writing some papers on Foucault and Shakespeare, including published pieces on ceremony and madness, and as yet unpublished lectures on contagion, landscape and the oath.

Geopolitics and Terrain

For several years I have been contributing to the debates about the notion of the ‘geo’ in geopolitics, to make this connect to land, earth and the world as an alternative to the globe and globalisation. My contributions build on earlier work on theorisations of the world in Lefebvre, Axelos, Fink, Sloterdijk, Badiou and Meillassoux, and my writings on volume and the volumetric, geometrics and the notion of terrain. Some of this research relates to The Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: Law, the Anthropocene, and the World (the ICE LAW Project), led by Phil Steinberg at Durham University. I led the Territory sub-project, and workshops were held in Amsterdam on 12 May 2017 (report here) and at Warwick on 1 December 2017 (report here). A final conference for the project was held in Durham in April 2019.

I gave the Dialogues in Human Geography lecture, at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) annual conference in London in August 2019, on the theme of ‘Terrain, Politics, History’. It is now published in the journal, along with responses by Deborah Dixon, Gastón Gordillo, Bruno Latour, Kimberley Peters and Rachael Squire, and a reply by me (see here; most pieces open access).