No Borders conference

Posted on February 9, 2012 by stuartelden

Posted in Boundaries, Conferences, Territory | Leave a comment

Elsevier launches ‘a new jounal’ – copyeditors required

Posted on February 7, 2012 by stuartelden

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Anachronic Shakespeare programme

Posted on February 7, 2012 by stuartelden

Really looking forward to this… been promised a ‘sexy poster’ at some point, so this is just the text and details.

Anachronic Shakespeare

A Poetics and Theory Conference

February 24-February 25, 2012

New York University

Jurow Hall, Silver Center

100 Washington Square East

New York, NY 10003

Friday, February 24th

10:00                    Welcome

10:15                    John Archer, Shakespeare’s Poor Beast (English, NYU)

11:45                    Stuart Elden, The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth (Geography, Durham University)

2:30                       Vike Plock, Made in Germany: Joyce Reading Goethe Reading Hamlet (English, University of Exeter)

3:45                       Rebecca Comay, Hamletizations (Benjamin, Schmitt…..) (Philosophy, University of Toronto)

5:30                       Keynote: Samuel Weber, Forgetting the Hobby-Horse: Hamlet Between Schmitt and Benjamin (Comparative Literature, Northwestern University)

6:30                      Response by Julia Lupton (English, UC Irvine)

Saturday, February 25th

10:00                    Anselm Haverkamp, Life in the Sonnets: On Life’s Anachronic Nature (English, NYU)

11:15                    Julia Lupton, Softscapes: Shakespeare by Design (English, UC Irvine)

2:00                       Closing Roundtable

Sponsored by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Lebensformen und Lebenswissen (Graduate Research Colloquium in Forms of Life and the Know-How of Living), the NYU Certificate in Poetics and Theory, and the NYU Comparative Literature Department.

http://poeticsandtheory.wordpress.com

Conference organized by Elizabeth Bonapfel, Martin Harries, Anselm Haverkamp, and Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

Posted in Conferences, William Shakespeare | 1 Comment

Boys Town Redux – Society and Space virtual theme issue

Posted on February 6, 2012 by stuartelden

Mary Thomas has put together a virtual theme issue of Society and Space, with 12 papers from the archive made open access for a limited time and an introduction. The inspiration is the twentieth anniversary of Rosalyn Deutsche’s critique of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, and the papers chosen to illustrate the work in the journal that has looked at questions of feminism, gender and sexuality. Papers include ones by Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, Cindi Katz, Geraldine Pratt and others, including Deutsche’s original piece: “Boys Town”.

Posted in David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Society and Space | Leave a comment

Jigawa State, Nigeria

Posted on February 6, 2012 by stuartelden

This is a more positive story from Nigeria.

In July this year The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, invited readers to submit images as part of their photography competition which helps raise awareness about different areas of health around the world.

This year Susan Elden, a Health Adviser in the Department for International Development’s Nigeria country office, submitted this photo, which has been selected as one of the winning entries.

Jigawa State (where the photo is taken) has some of the highest rates of maternal and child deaths in Nigeria and most women give birth at home. Before 2009, there were almost 70 midwives to serve a population of 5 million people.

The Nigerian Government responded by increasing the number of midwives and creating a new college of nursing and midwifery. This photograph captures the vision for the future alongside the reality of the present. The state hopes to recruit 500 nurses and midwives. The construction plans for the school will accommodate up to 200 nurses and provide modern classrooms and teaching facilities.

Although these efforts have created hope and a renewed feeling of pride, most Nigerians in Jigawa are subsistence farmers with little or no access to clean drinking water, electricity, or basic health services; female literacy in Jigawa is about 20%.

You can view this photo and the other winning entries in the The Lancet, Volume 378 Number 9809, December 17, 2011.

Picture: Department for International Development/Lindsay gbor – source

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Leeds talk on territory – this week

Posted on February 6, 2012 by stuartelden

This week I make the short trip to the University of Leeds to give the lecture ‘How should we do the history of territory?” This is the same talk I gave at KCL last week. Full details here.

Posted in Conferences, Michel Foucault, Territory, The Birth of Territory | Leave a comment

Five free downloads

Posted on February 6, 2012 by stuartelden

I’ve uploaded the pdfs of these five papers. I’ll put another five up when I have the chance. This page has the complete list of all the things I know are available free online.

Elden, S. Another sense of Demos: Kleisthenes and the Greek division of the Polis. Democratization. 2003;10:135-156.

Elden, S. & Mendieta, E. Being-With as Making Worlds: The ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2009;27:1-11.

Elden, S. Between Marx and Heidegger: Politics, Philosophy and Lefebvre’s ‘The Production of Space’. Antipode. 2004;36:86-105.

Elden, S. Blair, Neo-Conservatism and The War on Territorial Integrity. International Politics. 2007;44:37-57.

Elden, S. The constitution of the normal: monsters and masturbation at the Collège de France. Boundary 2. 2001;28:91-105.

Posted in Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, My Publications, Peter Sloterdijk, Territory, Terror and Territory, The Birth of Territory | Leave a comment

The Post-Kantian Poe

Posted on February 5, 2012 by stuartelden

Call for papers for The Edgar Allan Poe Review –

The editors invite original essays that address the influence of German Idealist and Romantic thought upon Edgar Allan Poe. While it has become a critical commonplace that Poe both makes use of and mocks many elements of German Idealism, there has been scant discussion of the specificities of Poe’s complex, and often vexed, treatments of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Poe studies enjoyed a brief revival of the “French Poe” following the psychoanalytic and deconstructive interventions of Lacan and Derrida, but the anti-theoretical backlash of the past two decades has tended to extradite Poe back to his country of origin, restoring his “American Face” at the cost of recognizing the transatlantic influences that indelibly shaped his writing. This collection will focus on Poe’s indebtedness to, as well as his critical distance from, the German Idealist and Romantic writers, but its intent is not to delineate, as Hansen and Pollin (1995) have done,  the “German Face” of Poe, so much as it is to reintroduce the theoretical aspect of Poe’s artistry back into the critical conversation.

More details here.

Posted in Edgar Allan Poe, Immanuel Kant | Leave a comment

Coriolanus – Ralph Fiennes and the text

Posted on February 5, 2012 by stuartelden

I saw the Ralph Fiennes film version of Coriolanus while down in London this week.

It’s good and worth seeing, though it has some problems, and does quite a lot of violence to the text (though not the plot) in the service of cinema. I’ve written a short piece on the film which should hopefully be out soon.

I also have more than a draft of a longer piece on the play itself (see some brief comments on it here and especially here, and the comments of Cavell and Žižek). I’m still not entirely sure what to do with this, though I am tending towards saving the piece back for a bigger project.

Posted in William Shakespeare | 7 Comments

More doubts about the Jeremy Bamber conviction

Posted on February 5, 2012 by stuartelden

Ballistics experts raise doubts as to whether the much-disputed silencer was ever used – report in The Guardian, and a video reviewing the case a year ago. I said something about this case in my piece on the Troy Davis execution last year. Bamber recently lost his appeal against the ‘full life’ sentence, so it appears that only an overturning of the conviction could lead to his release. There remain serious doubts, not only about the silencer but also about the conduct of the Essex police. Even the policeman in the video agrees the investigation was ‘badly handled’ though he maintains the right result came anyway. A full review seems essential. Another BBC report provides some recent background.

Posted in Jeremy Bamber | 1 Comment