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Department of Geography

Staff Profile

Professor Stuart Elden, BSc (Hons); PhD; PGCert, DLitt

Personal web page

Professor in the Department of Geography
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 41945
Fax: +44 (0)191 33 41801
Room number: 409

Contact Professor Stuart Elden (email at stuart.elden@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Stuart Elden's research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography.

In 2011 he was given the Royal Geographical Society Murchison Award for work judged to contribute most to geographical science in preceding years for 'publications in political geography'. In 2013 he was awarded a DLitt on the basis of publications post-PhD. His book Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty won the Association of American Geographers Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography and the Political Geography Speciality Group Julian Minghi Outstanding Research Award.

He joined the Department of Geography as a lecturer in 2002, was promoted to Reader in 2005, and to Professor in 2007. Before arriving at Durham he studied for a BSc (Hons) in Politics and Modern History (1994) and a PhD in Political Theory (1999), both from Brunel University. Between 1999 and 2002 he was a lecturer in the Politics and International Studies department of the University of Warwick.

He is the editor of Society and Space (Environment and Planning D), having previously served on the editorial board. He has also been the review editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and was one of the founding editors of Foucault Studies. At Durham he is the Social Science Director of the Institute of Advanced Study and the Academic Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit.

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; Department of Geography, University of Washington; as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London; and as a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. From 2013 he has been working with Al Quds Bard Honors College in Palestine as an International Scholar as part of the Open Society Institute's Academic Fellowship Program.

More on his background can be found in these interviews:

The Birth of Territory

Between 2008 and 2011 he was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on a history of the concept of territory. A substantial research monograph entitled The Birth of Territory is the outcome of this work. This provides a detailed account of Western political thought from the perspective of the relation between power and place. The book offers an account of the emergence of territory; but in doing so also provides an alternative history of the the modern state from the perspective of its territory.

There is a page on the Progressive Geographies site which links to all the online material relating to this project - video and audio recordings; comments on each of the chapters; and related articles.

The book will appear with University of Chicago Press in August 2013.

Social/Spatial Theory

Earlier work had a focus on three key thinkers - Heidegger, Foucault and Lefebvre. Books were written on each of these thinkers. Each provided a close textual and contextualised reading, seeking to situate these thinkers in their time and place and to make arguments about the applicability of their work to other problems. An interest in all three thinkers continues, particularly in terms of newly published writings and lecture courses of Heidegger and Foucault.

Other work on this theme included three co-edited and/or co-translated books of Henri Lefebvre's writings for Continuum and University of Minnesota Press; edited a book on the work of Peter Sloterdijik; and co-edited collections of essays on the geographical thought of Michel Foucault and Immanuel Kant.

Future Projects

He is currently working on three projects -

1. A book under the working title of Shakespearean Territories, reading 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 I hope 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.

2. A study of the last decade of Foucault's work, in order to outline an intellectual history of his final project on the history of sexuality.

3. A project trying to rethink the notion of the ‘geo’ in geopolitics, to make this connect to land, earth and the world as an alternative to the globe and globalisation. It builds on earlier work on theorisations of the world in Lefebvre, Axelos, Fink, Sloterdijk, Badiou and Meillassoux. The idea is to put these philosophies of the world into dialogue with empirical concerns.

 

Research Groups

Research Interests

  • The history of geographical thought
  • The history of the concept of territory
  • The territorial aspects of the 'war on terror'
  • European political theory and philosophy
  • Western Marxism
  • The politics of calculation
  • Concepts of the world

Selected Publications

Journal papers: academic

Books: authored

Books: edited

Books: sections

Departmental working papers

Edited works: journals

Show all publications

Related Links

Grants Awarded

  • 2011: Visiting Fellowship, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University
  • 2009: Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London
  • 2009: Distinguished Visiting Scholarship, Ben Gurion University, Israel
  • 2008: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Visiting Scholarship, National University of Singapore
  • 2007: Kant's Geography (British Academy Conference Grant, £2000)
  • 2007: Kant's Geography (Leverhulme Research Fellowship, £22,048)
  • 2006: The Geometry of the Political: A History of the Concept of Territory (Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, £113,151 - to run from 1 February 2008 to 31st January 2011)
  • 2005: International River Boundaries Database (RGS-IBG Small Grant, £2750)
  • 2005: The Territorial Integrity of Iraq: Preservation, Sovereignty, Viability (Nuffield Foundation, £5771)

Supervises