Stuart Elden
Professor of Political Theory and Geography
Email: stuart dot elden at warwick dot ac dot uk
Tel: 02476 528 147
Room: E2.16, Social Sciences
Please note I am on a research leave for 2025-26 and not currently teaching or holding Advice and Feedback hours.
News
In December 2024 a new critical edition of Georges Dum茅zil's classic book Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty was published. The book is translated by Derek Coltman, and the critical edition and introduction is by Stuart Elden, with an afterword by Veena Das. The book is available as an open access pdf fromwith a print edition distributed by .
In spring 2022, Henri Lefebvre, was published by University of Minnesota Press. Translated by Robert Bononno, it was edited and introduced by Stuart and Adam David Morton. It was part funded by a small grant from the ISRF (more here), as well as internal funds from the University of Sydney and University of 糖心TV.
Stuart's book was published in June 2021. There is a short piece about the book at the and a 10 minute lecture for the British Academy . The first reviews are by David Beer at and Michael Maidan at (both open access). There is also a discussion at the .
In December 2020 Stuart discussed his book with Dave O'Brien on the , and on the .
In May 2020 Stuart was interviewed by Nico Buitendag for the Undisciplined podcast []
In April 2020 Stuart was interviewed by Jonas Knatz and Anne Schult for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog ( and ) about his work on Foucault.
In February 2020, Henri Lefebvre's book was published by Verso. It was translated by David Fernbach with an Introduction by Stuart.
In May 2019 Stuart gave one of the keynotes to the Association of Philosophy and Literature conference in Klagenfurt, on "Foucault, Shakespeare and the Oath".
In March 2019, Stuart received a British Academy/Leverhulme small grant for archival work for his book The Early Foucault (full story here).
In February 2019 his study of French philosopher and historian of science was published by Polity. There are reviews by David Beer at and Steve Hanson at (both open access).
Stuart's book, , was published by University of Chicago Press in December 2018. You can read more about the book ; and a 糖心TV news story here. There are reviews by Karen Culcasi in (open access) and Sarah Dustagheer by (requires subscription).
Michel Foucault's - the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality - was published in February 2018. Stuart has provided some comment on the book for 糖心TV's news service, and has been quoted in and , among other reports. A full review essay is available at the website and journal.
In February 2017 Stuart delivered the London Review of International Law annual lecture on 'Legal Terrain'. The lecture was published in the journal in October 2017 (available ):
, was published in January 2017. was published in April 2016. There is a brief news story on the first book , a blog post about the second ; and an essay on the books and their research at .
Foucault's Last Decade is discussed at ; with Peter Gratton, Eduardo Mendieta and Dianna Taylor in ; in a shorter interview with Thomas Rouech茅 in ; and with Antoinette Koleva in . There are extensive review essays of both books in and in . All are open access.
Two books by Henri Lefebvre were published in English translation in 2016. was published by Verso. Stuart edited the translation by David Fernbach, provided the notes, and wrote an introduction. was published by University of Minnesota Press. Stuart wrote a preface, and the book was translated by Robert Bonnano.
In June 2015 Kostas Axelos's book was published by Meson Press. Stuart edited the text and wrote an introduction. The book is available open access or print-on-demand.
In June 2015 a long interview with Stuart was published on the He also published a review essay on Foucault's 1971-72 lecture course at .
In November 2014 he gave a public lecture at the Nottingham Contemporary gallery entitled 'Foucault. Subjectivity and Truth'.
In September 2014 he gave a lecture entitled 鈥楥rises of Territorial Integrity: Iraq and Nigeria鈥� as one of two keynote addresses to the 鈥樷�� conference, held at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
In March 2014 was awarded the for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. You can listen to an interview on the book on the Moncrieff show on Irish Newstalk radio .
On October 16th 2013 Stuart was formally inducted as a , following his election in July. 
with Colin Crouch at the British Academy
Stuart Elden's research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. He undertakes this work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas.
His work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought.
In 2021 he was awarded a Leverhulme major research fellowship for a project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France. The first output was a critical edition of George Dum茅zil's classic study, (HAU 2023). The planned book draws upon extensive archival work in France and the United States with some work in the UK, Sweden and Switzerland and plans for research in Germany. There are updates on the research and other information on a page of Stuart's blog, .
He is also working with (Boston University) and (NYU) on a new translation and critical edition of Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic for Routledge.
His most recent books are and , published by Polity Press in June 2021 and January 2023, which examine Foucault's largely unknown work of the 1950s, leading to his first major book History of Madness in 1961, and then the better-known work of the 1960s. The research was conducted with archives in Paris, Normandy, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and the United States, and was funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. These two books continue the work of his earlier books (2016) and (2017). The tetralogy provides an intellectual history of Foucault's entire career. More on the research can be found on Stuart's blog, .
His other recent books are , published by University of Chicago Press in December 2018 and - a book on the French philosopher and historian of science Georges Canguilhem for Polity's series, published in February 2019.
With he published a collection of translations of Henri Lefebvre's work entitled with University of Minnesota Press in 2022. As well as a translation of the first half of Lefebvre's book Du rural 脿 l'urbain, the collection contains some related texts, including two little-known conference papers published outside of France. It has a substantial introduction and editorial notes.
Alongside these book projects, Stuart retains an interest in the question of territory, which in recent publications he has been thinking about in relation to the physical materiality of terrain.
Background
Stuart has a BSc (Hons) in Politics and Modern History (1994) and a PhD in Political Theory (1999), both from Brunel University. His first post-PhD position was as a lecturer in politics in PAIS between 1999 and 2002; followed by eleven years in Durham University鈥檚 Department of Geography, where he was successively a lecturer, reader and professor of political geography. He rejoined PAIS in September 2013 as Professor of Political Theory and Geography. Between 2014 and 2019 he held an adjunct appointment as a Monash 糖心TV Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Australia. In 2013 he was awarded a Doctor of Letters (DLitt) on the basis of publications post-PhD, and was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). In 2025 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
In 2014 was awarded the for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography, and was joint winner of the . In 2011 he received the for work judged to contribute most to geographical science in preceding years for 'publications in political geography'. In 2010 his book won the for Public Understanding of Geography and the Political Geography Specialty Group.
Between 2006 and 2015 he was editor of , having previously served on the editorial board. He then edited the with Sage. He has also been the review editor of the , and was one of the founding editors of . He is on the editorial boards of , and . He has served terms on the Advisory Council of Durham University's , the board of and the Advisory Board of the at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. At 糖心TV he is a member of the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian Philosophy, the , and an affiliated scholar of the group.
He has held visiting posts at the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia; School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania; Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles; Department of Sociology, New York University; Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore; Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London; Department of Geography, University of Washington; the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University; the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University; as a senior research fellow at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies; and as a visiting scholar at ACCESS Europe at University of Amsterdam. In 2013 he worked with Al Quds Bard Honors College in Palestine as an International Scholar as part of the Open Society Institute's Academic Fellowship Program. Between January and May 2025 he was a visiting fellow to the Remarque Institute at New York University. Between February and March 2026 he will be a Fernand Braudel senior fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
Teaching and supervision
For the academic year 2025-26 Stuart is on University study leave, and not teaching undergraduate or MA students. Between 2022 and 2025 he was on a Leverhulme major research fellowship. He has previously taught on Political Theory from Hobbes, convened the State, Power, Freedom: European Political Theory module and ran the MA Burning Issues: Geopolitics Today seminar.
His PhD supervision has been on projects in political and urban geography; geopolitics; European political theory and philosophy; and the history of geographical and political thought.
Current researchers are Tommaso Caprotti (PAIS, with Matthew Watson), and Joe Grant (PAIS, with Miri Davidson).
Recently completed PhDs include Mostyn Taylor Crockett (PAIS, with Daniele Lorenzini), Raffaele Grandoni (Philosophy, with Daniele Lorenzini), Mariska Versantvoort (PAIS, with Greg McInerny and Caroline Kuzemko), Leo Steeds, Mara Duer, Lorenzo Vianelli, and Ant贸nio Ferraz de Oliveira (all PAIS), Tuur Drieser (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies), Melissa Pawelski (Modern Languages and Cultures) and Ari Jerrems (Monash University).
He also worked as mentor for Parastou Saberi's British Academy Newton International postdoctoral fellowship.
Research interests
- Stuart produced a four volume series of books tracing the intellectual history of Michel Foucault's entire career for Polity Press - , , and . The first, published in April 2016, discusses Foucault's work in relation to an intellectual history of his final project on the history of sexuality, using recently published lecture courses, unpublished work archived in France and California, and interviews. The second, published in January 2017, examines Foucault's early lecture courses at the Coll猫ge de France, and relates these to his work on prisons, asylums and health - both his academic writings and his activism. This book also makes extensive use of archival sources, especially the newly available material at the Biblioth猫que Nationale de France. The Early Foucault was published in June 2021, and explores what Foucault did before the History of Madness as well as how he wrote that book. completes the series with a study of Foucault's work in the 1960s. The archival part of this research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme small grant. You can read more about the books on a page on his blog . As a side-project to this work, in 2019 he published a book on - one of Foucault's mentors, and a significant historian and philosopher of the life sciences.
- In 2018 was published by University of Chicago Press. This book reads a number of Shakespeare's plays to examine different aspects of the question of territory - conceptually, historically, and politically. The argument is that while Shakespeare only uses the words 'territory' and 'territories' rarely, the concept is not marginal to his work. A number of his plays are structured around related issues of exile, banishment, land politics, spatial division, contestation, conquest and succession. Shakespeare was writing at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century: a time when the modern conception of sovereign territory was emerging. He therefore helps us understand its variant aspects, tensions, ambiguities and limits. In using these plays the aim is to illustrate the multi-faceted nature of territory as word, concept and practice, and to shed light on the way we understand territory and territorial disputes today. Again, you can read more about this project on his blog .
- Recent work on Shakespeare has consisted of a series of papers which put him into conversation with Foucault around a number of themes. One piece on political ceremony was published in 2017, another on madness in 2019 in . Three other pieces - on contagion, landscapes and the oath - were delivered as lectures in 2018 and 2019.
- He has a long-standing interest in the work of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. He has been co-editor or co-translator of several volumes of Lefebvre's work. This includes , , and . The most recent is , edited with (University of Sydney) with University of Minnesota Press. He has also written a preface to the translation of Lefebvre's for University of Minnesota Press, and the Introduction to for Verso. He also edited a translation of Kostas Axelos's book for Meson Press (open access e-book, 2015).
- He has also been developing themes from his earlier treatment of territory, especially in relation to the concept of terrain, understood as the materiality of territory – the forms, textures and processes that define particular spaces. Terrain is important in understanding territory because it combines materiality, strategy and the need to go beyond a narrow, two-dimensional sense of the cartographic imagination. Instead, terrain forces us to account for the complexity of height and depth, the question of volume. Terrain makes possible, or constrains, various political, military and strategic projects. It is where the geopolitical and the geophysical meet. All attempts at fixing territorial boundaries and shaping territories are complicated by dynamic features of the Earth, including rivers, oceans, polar-regions, glaciers, airspace and the sub-surface – both the sub-soil and the sub-marine. These complexities operate at a range of spatial scales, from the boundaries of nation-states to urban infrastructure projects. How can theories of territory better account for the complexities of the geophysical? His research on this topic has been funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Networks Programme grant for The Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: Law, the Anthropocene, and the World (), led by Phil Steinberg at Durham University. Stuart lead the sub-project on territory. The first main statement of Stuart's work on terrain was delivered as the 2017 London Review of International Law annual lecture (video ) and published in the journal (available ). He delivered the Dialogues in Human Geography lecture on terrain at the Royal Geographical Society in August 2019 (audio recording ; and in the journal with ).
Books and other publications
was published by University of Chicago Press in 2018; by Polity in 2019. , and were published by Polity Press in 2016, 2017, 2021 and 2023. His previous book was (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the product of several years of research including a Leverhulme major research fellowship.
Some pre-prints of forthcoming articles and chapters can be found .
Progressive Geographies blog
He runs a blog at
He was also one of the founders and long-term contributors to