My name is Stuart Elden and this is a site about politics, philosophy and geography, interesting books, my own writing and whatever else comes to mind.

At the moment I am writing books on Shakespeare, on the very early Foucault, on Georges Canguilhem, and further ahead hope to continue work on the relation between geopolitics and debates about earth, terrain and volume.

I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, in the Politics and International Studies department. I hold an adjunct appointment as Monash Warwick Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University as part of the Monash-Warwick Alliance. I was previously Professor of Political Geography at Durham University, where I was one of the Directors of the Institute of Advanced Study and the Academic Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit.

Between 2006 and 2015 I was editor of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Since 2011 the editorial team have run a companion open site at www.societyandspace.com I now edit a Society and Space book series with Sage. I have also served as review editor of the Review of International Political Economy and was a founding editor of Foucault Studies. I serve on the board of Foucault Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, and Geographica Helvetica.

My interests range fairly widely between philosophy, politics, geography, literature and history. My work has predominantly looked at several European thinkers, principally Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, but also Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Leibniz, Peter Sloterdijk, Kostas Axelos and Eugen Fink; and at the question of territory – conceptually, historically and politically. I’m the author of seven books and the editor of eight. My most recent books Foucault’s Last Decade and Foucault: The Birth of Power were published by Polity in 2016 and 2017. On these projects see this page.

My articles have appeared in journals in a range of disciplines, and some articles and chapters have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Turkish, Russian, Farsi, Hebrew and Korean. The Birth of Territory is forthcoming in Chinese translation, books on Lefebvre and Foucault forthcoming in Korean, and other translations are in discussion.

I’ve been fortunate to receive awards for some of my work. Terror and Territory won the Association of American Geographers Globe book award, the Political Geography specialty group Julian Minghi award and the Royal Geographical Society Murchison award; The Birth of Territory won the Association of American Geographers Meridian book award and was joint-winner of the inaugural Global Discourse book award. I was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013.

You can find a list of future talks here and free downloads here. Forthcoming papers, including some preprints, are here. Some resources, including reading guides, bibliographies, a few short translations, etc. are here.

When I’m not working I enjoy cycling, watching cricket, theatre and a range of music.

A list of Frequently Asked Questions and responses is here. Please note that while I welcome comments, they need to be accompanied by a valid email address. Comments using false email addresses, false names, multiple false identities from a single IP address, etc. will not be posted. I’d rather not have to turn comments off, but I will ‘trash’ anything inappropriate. In the Middle has a moderation policy that provides a good justification for the kind of comments I would like to see here.