Thinking Outside the Canon traces author Michael J. Shapiro’s intellectual journey as a political theorist who has adapted multidisciplinary practices and unconventional texts across his career to develop a more diverse model of doing theory. Theorizing textuality and historiography, Shapiro draws on a variety of disciplinary idioms and texts that span across genres and geographies, ranging from Caribbean fiction to Ukraine war fictional ethnographies. As well, he covers an array of scales and spaces, from the state to the individual room. As such, Thinking Outside the Canon reflects how the field of political theory has grown and shifted through the author’s own textual odyssey.
After recovering the early portion of his own political theory odyssey, Shapiro traces his departures from the canon. He recounts how, through this departure, he refashioned his scholarship via a series of textual engagements and composed the basis of an instructional inquiry focused on textuality and historiography. Finally, Shapiro relates how Thinking Outside the Canon functions as his own learning text, as both a theorist and writer and as a student, looking towards the future of the political theory canon and its usefulness.
Bourse internationale IMEC/Centre Michel Foucault, 2025 – détails at Foucault News
Version PDF L’Imec et le Centre Michel Foucault lancent un appel à chercheur pour l’attribution de la 5ème Bourse internationale Imec/Centre Michel Foucault.
L’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Imec), préserve et met en valeur une collection exceptionnelle d’archives dédiée à l’histoire de la pensée et de la création contemporaine. Depuis sa fondation, l’IMEC contribue au rayonnement de la recherche sur la vie littéraire, éditoriale, artistique et intellectuelle. Dans ce cadre, l’Imec souhaite renforcer sa politique de coopération professionnelle et scientifique avec le monde de la recherche, et en particulier auprès des chercheurs internationaux.
L’Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault a été fondée en 1986, à l’initiative de chercheurs internationaux qui ont accompagné le développement du travail et de la pensée de l’auteur des Mots et les choses. Initialement créé pour rassembler documents, archives et travaux composant l’œuvre de Foucault, pour faciliter et coordonner des recherches se rapportant à son œuvre ou s’inspirant de ses orientations et de ses méthodes et pour développer les échanges internationaux autour de cette œuvre, le Centre Michel Foucault a également accompagné durant les 3 dernières décennies la publication des Dits et écrits puis des cours au Collège de France, en lien avec des activités de recherche menées à partir des archives déposées à l’Imec et à la BnF.
La Bourse Michel Foucault s’inscrit par conséquent dans cette dynamique de valorisation, au cœur des objectifs du CMF….
Date limite de dépôt des dossiers : 15 décembre 2025 Désignation lauréat·e : 30 janvier 2026 Durée de la résidence : 2 mois
CFP: The twenty-fourth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle, University of Notre Dame, April 3-5, 2025
We seek submissions for papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work, as well as studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking. This conference also celebrates the centennial of Foucault’s birth, so we also welcome biographical retrospectives and papers that set an agenda for the next century of Foucauldian thought….
The definitive English translation of the celebrated story collection regarded as a landmark of Norwegian literature and culture—now in paperback
The extraordinary folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe began appearing in Norway in 1841. Over the next two decades the publication of subsequent editions under the title Norske folkeeventyr made the names Asbjørnsen and Moe synonymous with Norwegian storytelling traditions. Tiina Nunnally’s vivid translation of their monumental collection is the first new English translation in more than 150 years—and the first ever to include all sixty original tales.
Magic and myth inhabit these pages in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. The clever and fearless boy Ash Lad often takes center stage as he ingeniously breaks spells and defeats enemies to win half the kingdom. These stories, set in Norway’s majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate. All are rendered in the deceptively simple narrative style perfected by Asbjørnsen and Moe—now translated into an English that is as finely tuned to the modern ear as it is true to the original Norwegian.
Included here—for the very first time in English—are Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Forewords and Introductions to the early Norwegian editions of the tales. Asbjørnsen gives us an intriguing glimpse into the actual collection process and describes how the stories were initially received, both in Norway and abroad. Equally fascinating are Moe’s views on how central characters might be interpreted and his notes on the regions where each story was originally collected. Nunnally’s informative Translator’s Note places the tales in a biographical, historical, and literary context for the twenty-first century.
The Norwegian folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe are timeless stories that will entertain, startle, and enthrall readers of all ages.
The First World War hardly ended with the formal Armistice in Europe on November 11, 1918, amid the continuing violence of blockades and epidemics, amid numerous forms of reconstruction and revolution. Its legacies, in fact, resonate deeply in our present. Nor is it obvious that it only began on July 28, 1914, just a month after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Rather than these formal legal openings and closings, the beginnings and endings of wartime are many, depending upon the questions we ask, and the frames of reference we provide. For many at the time, the outbreak of what would become the First World War was an inevitability, the result of rising tensions over decades, whether due to the dynamics and systems of international politics within Europe, or a result of the competitive logic of imperial politics as practised by Europe outside its borders, rebounding back upon it. This resulted in equally persistent ideas down to our own time, about the inevitability that followed from victory; namely, that to be successful and realistic, modern politics and economics must necessarily be fixed in the form of a democratic nation-state. But this new world of democracy, forged in war, could easily become its own sort of intellectual prison-house, curating and limiting political and economic possibilities just as securely as any form of tyranny. That the tyranny of victory was a danger recognized by many of the leading analysts of the First World War at the time, helped to foster a continued search for ideas that might keep the worlds of politics and economics open to alternative futures, rather than being closed by the force of a few great powers or the presentational fiat of democracy. Those hopes paved the way for the wide variety of anti-imperial, federal, diasporic, and revolutionary forms of political and economic arrangements, which were designed to challenge the seemingly inevitable rise of the nation-state.
Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and theReconstruction of Modern Politics provides a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politics and economics that were made, and remade, through wartime and revolution, by political and economic thinkers working across the globe, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Spanning continents, connecting networks of people, power, and possibilities, in new and often experimental ways, the worlds of wartime saw histories of modern politics and economics revised and updated, used as well as abused, in myriad attempts to interpret, explain, understand, explore, and indeed to win, the war. This book takes the measure of a great many of these overlapping visions, and it does so by trying to learn some of the lessons that literary and artistic modernism can teach us about the complexities of political and economic ideas, their contingency and uncertainty, and how they are fixed into focus only at very particular moments. Moving from the stylised narratives of European and American political theory and intellectual history, through to the futurist politics of revolutionaries in Ireland, India, Ottoman-Turkey, and Russia, this book also tracks arguments and strategies for Pan-African diasporic federation, alongside German and American debates about federal pasts and federal futures. From the invention of the world economy, to the reality of multiple war economies, from revolutionary conjunctures to ideas of democracy and climate catastrophe in the Anthropocene today, Worlds of Wartime tells the story of just how strongly modern politics in general, and modern ideas about political and economic possibility, were fixed by the intellectual turbulence wrought during the First World War.
This book focuses on political presuppositions animating modern historical reflection in Germany that underwent sharp radicalization in the post-World War I context of the Weimar Republic. It is in this context that a novel polemical use of political concepts, nourished by radical forms of reflection on the historical character of human existence, brought to the fore interpretations of collective mentalities or group perspectives that crystallized in specific conceptions of “ideology” and of “political myth”. By centering analysis on the insight of a variety of twentieth-century thinkers whose works are of central importance for the elucidation of this topic, the author examines different interpretations of the role of reflection on human historicity in the elaboration of this novel polemical use of political concepts. Beyond an historical inquiry into this topic, this work aims to provide a theoretical investigation to elucidate the complex range of significations of the concepts of “ideology” and of “political myth”, the province of each of these concepts in the delineation of group perspectives, and the problematic legacy that the polemical use of these concepts has bequeathed to the contemporary world.
In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.
This book examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarcerationtraces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire
“First-rate. . . . A sterling example of historical revisionism.”—Publishers Weekly
From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize.
Workers often turned to their associations for solidarity and shared identity in the ancient world. Some of these groups even negotiated contracts, wages, and work conditions in a manner similar to modern labor unions. As the world begins to consider the value—and indeed the necessity—of unionization to protect workers, this book demonstrates that we can learn valuable lessons from ancient laborers and from attempts by the Roman government to limit their freedom.
