Sunday histories

Over the past few years, Progressive Geographies has become too much of a noticeboard, sharing information about books, talks or shorter pieces by other people that look interesting, and, much less often, a few things about my own work. I’ve shared some research resources – bibliographies, a few textual comparisons, sometimes very short translations – but not written very much for the blog itself, apart from the research updates on my Mapping Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France project.

While I don’t intend to stop sharing links to other people’s work, through 2025 I’ve been posting weekly essays to this site. The ‘Sunday histories’ are:

1. Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B – 5 January 2025
2. Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University – 12 January 2025 (updated 14 January 2025)
3. Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague – 19 January 2025
4. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940): an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology – 26 January 2025 (revised and expanded from a 2 May 2023 post)
5. Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste – 2 February 2025
6. Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel and The Song of Igor – 9 February 2025
7. Ernst Kantorowicz and the California Loyalty Oath – 16 February 2025
8. Walter B. Henning, Robert Oppenheimer, Ernst Kantorowicz, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Khwarezmian Dictionary Project – 23 February 2025
9. The Friendship between Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Koyré – 2 March 2025
10. Alexandre Koyré’s Wartime Teaching at the École Libre des Hautes Études and the New School – 9 March 2025
11. Hannah Arendt, David Farrell Krell and the early English translations of Heidegger – 16 March 2025
12. Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett’s 1980 NYU seminar on “Sexuality and Solitude” – some notes on attendance and readings – 23 March 2025
13. The Territory of the Vocabulary and the Vocabulary of Territory: Emile Benveniste – 30 March 2025
14. Who translated Foucault’s The Order of Things? – 6 April 2025 (updated 17 June 2025)
15. Elisabeth Raucq, animal names and approaches to Indo-European vocabulary – 13 April 2025
16. Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth – 20 April 2025
17. Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee’ – 27 April 2025
18. Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, and The Song of Igor: other sources for the story of a failed collaboration – 4 May 2025
19. The Murder of Ioan Culianu: Eliade, Anton, Eco, Lincoln and the University of Chicago – 11 May 2025
20. Alexandre Koyré in Cairo – 18 May 2025
21. The Early Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Swift – 25 May 2025
22. Roman Jakobson, Franz Boas, and the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library – 1 June 2025
23. Gillian Rose and the Indo-Europeanists – 8 June 2025
24. Josué V. Harari, the Marquis de Sade, and Michel Foucault’s 1970 lectures in Buffalo – 15 June 2025
25. Henri Lefebvre and the “Liste Otto” of Prohibited Books in Occupied France – 22 June 2025
26. 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 – 29 June 2025
27. Eugenio Donato and “The Structuralist Controversy” conference – proceedings, recordings, Foucault and Flaubert – 6 July 2025
28. Two Greek Words for Kings and the Question of Territory: Wanax, Basileus and Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire – 13 July 2025 (updated 6 August 2025)
29. Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre and the translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology – 20 July 2025
30. Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course – 27 July 2025
31. Herman Lommel and the ancient Aryans – Hegel’s great-grandson, Saussure translator and his links to Benveniste, Dumézil and Wikander – 3 August 2025
32. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France: A Structural Analysis of the Wolverine in North American Mythology – 10 August 2025
33. Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus – 17 August 2025
34. Michel Foucault’s early English translations – indications from the archives of the Georges Borchardt literary agency, the memoirs of André Schiffrin and the Susan Sontag connection – 24 August 2025
35. Roman Jakobson’s two series of 1972 lectures at the Collège de France: dating, topics and archival traces, and his friendships with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan – 31 August 2025
36. Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies – Samuel Weber, Deconstruction and the American Reception of French Theory – 7 September 2025
37. Pierre Bourdieu and Erwin Panofsky: Architecture, Scholasticism and the Concept of Habitus – 14 September 2025
38. Étienne Wolff and the biology of monsters: writing as a prisoner of war, Collège de France administrator, and Georges Canguilhem, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault’s engagement with his work – 21 September 2025
39. Books written by French professors while prisoners of war in World War II, and the Université de Captivité in Oflag XVII-A – 28 September 2025
40. From a Watershed to the Parting of the Waters: A Note on Michel Foucault and Peter Brown – 5 October 2025
41. Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology? – 12 October 2025
42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil and Benoîte Groult: the Académie française and the debate about feminine nouns for professions – 19 October 2025
43. Roman Jakobson’s paper to The First World Conference on Yiddish Studies, 1958: “The Languages of the Diaspora as a Particular Linguistic Problem” – 26 October 2025
44. Foucault’s Hermaphrodites – from Herculine Barbin to a planned volume of the History of Sexuality and the recently published manuscript – 2 November 2025
45. Vladimir Nabokov’s original and unpublished translation of The Discourse of Igor’s Campaign; and Roman Jakobson’s enduring wish to complete his English edition – 9 November 2025
46. Foucault’s Multiple Plans for his History of Sexuality – 16 November 2025
47. Gordon and Tina Wasson, Slavic Studies in the Cold War, and the Hallucinogenic Mushroom – 23 November 2025
48. 100 years since the Locarno Treaties and territorial integrity today – 30 November 2025
49. Huguette Fugier’s study of the vocabulary of the sacred in Latin, and Giorgio Agamben’s other sources for the notion of the homo sacer – 7 December 2025
50. Boris Porshnev – from peasant revolts in 17th century France to cryptozoology and the quest for the Soviet Yeti – 14 December 2025
51. On the Trail of a Misplaced Reference in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic – will be posted 21 December 2025

Hors-séries – often shorter notes, posted mid-week

These pieces are intended to be short and accessible, lacking the full references of something I’d try to publish more formally. They are usually tangential to what I’m working on, perhaps a development of something which would only be a footnote or aside in another text. Sometimes they will be some notes on a topic which might be further developed in the future, or where I’ve reached a dead end. Or they might be a few thoughts on a recent book I’ve just read – not quite a review, but perhaps close to that. 

The title ‘Sunday histories’ comes from the condescending name of ‘Sunday historian’ given to amateurs by professional historians, since these were people whose only time for doing history was outside of the working week. Philippe Ariès called his memoir Un Historien du Dimanche for this reason. My first degree is in Politics and Modern History, and although I’ve had visiting posts in History, I’ve not had a teaching position in a History department. But these short posts are also histoires in the French sense of stories as much as formal histories. At the end of each of these texts I’ve tried to provide a few indications of sources which would provide much more information. 

These pieces are also a bit of a reaction against academic publishing – its slow processes, its costs, and its metrics. These pieces are posted when I’ve finished them, though they might be revised later; they are free to access (I don’t plan to turn these into subscription-only); and they are not ‘outputs’ in the tradition sense.

As with the post about Sjoestedt, on Koyré in Cairo, and the two on Henri Lefebvre, I will sometimes revisit earlier occasional pieces on this blog, and tidy them up into a similar format. All these pieces are provisional and suggestions are welcome. I’m sure specialists in the areas I discuss will know much more or correct details. I hope there is some interest in them.