A series of events fostering dialogue on women's contributions to global affairs, engaging scholars, students, and the community. Supported by the City and University of Trento.
Book presentation
Patricia Owens (Università di Oxford) Erased. A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press 2025).
Chair
Sara Lorenzini (Università di Trento)
The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased, Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain,
Patricia Owens is professor of international relations at Oxford University and a fellow of Somerville College. She is the author of Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton), Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford) and Economy of Force (Cambridge), and the coeditor of Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge), Women’s International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge), and The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford).
Meeting in English.