Progressive Geographies

My book Shakespearean Territories was published by University of Chicago Press right at the end of the year, although it doesn’t seem to be available everywhere just yet. A journal article previewing some of the book’s arguments appeared as “Why Should People Interested in Territory read William Shakespeare?” in Territory, Politics, Governance (open access).

I also wrote a long review essay on the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité, Les aveux de la chair for Theory, Culture and Society. It appeared open access on their website, and later in the Annual Review.

My book on George Canguilhem was completed this year and should appear in early 2019 with Polity. I spent much of the year researching and writing The Early Foucault, which is still in progress. Updates on this work can be found here. A number of book chapters, some written quite a long time ago, are forthcoming in collections in 2019.

I spoke on Foucault at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Goldsmiths, University of London (recording here) and the University of Sussex (recording here), and on Shakespeare at Kings College London and Queen Mary University of London (recordings here). I also took part in a discussion on urban territory with Neil Brenner at the Architectural Association (video here).

I taught both contemporary geopolitics and European political theory at Warwick, both of which were interesting for me, and I hope for the students. The biggest disappointment was not getting a visiting fellowship, which I’d really wanted.

Two researchers I co-supervised, Ari Jerroms (Monash) and António Ferrez de Oliveria (Warwick), were both awarded their PhDs. At the beginning of the year I was pleased to examine Johanne Bruun’s excellent thesis at Durham University. Congratulations to them all.

Looking ahead to 2019, I already have quite a few speaking and writing commitments. They are all on Foucault, Shakespeare and territory/terrain, which seem likely to be the focus of my work for some time to come. The three major talks are the Denis Cosgrove lecture in the Geohumanities on ‘Shakespearean Landscapes’, a keynote to the Association for Philosophy and Literature conference in Austria, and the Dialogues in Human Geography lecture at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers annual conference. The Dialogues lecture will probably be on territory/terrain, and the APL one on Shakespeare. There are some other events in the diary, some of which are provisional. As ever, all confirmed details of future talks are here.

The academic books I liked most from 2018 are listed here; the music I enjoyed here; and the novels and biographies read here. Thanks for reading this last year. Many blogs I follow seem to be going dormant or at least much quieter, and Twitter seems to have become a much more common source of sharing/commenting. I’ve noticed a drop in visitors here too, and have posted less as well, but there seems to be enough interest to keep this site going for a while longer.