Professor Patricia Owens awarded BISA’s best book prize for co-edited anthology on women’s international thought
DPIR’S Professor Patricia Owens has won the prestigious British International Studies Association’s (BISA) Susan Strange Prize for Best Book in International Studies this year for her co-edited anthology, Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon.
The prize honours the work of Susan Strange – one of the most influential figures in British International Studies – and rewards outstanding current work being conducted in the discipline. The prize announcement was made by BISA at its annual conference in Glasgow this week.
Published by Cambridge University Press and co-edited with Dr Katharina Rietzler, Professor Kimberly Hutchings and Dr Sarah C Dunstan, Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon explores how women transformed the practice of international relations, from the early to middle twentieth century.
The book highlights a significant distortion in current understandings of the history of international relation and offers an alternative ‘archive’ of international thought. This is the second time Professor Owens has won the Susan Strange Prize, which she received in 2016, for her book Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge 2015).
This is a huge honour for the team of editors to win the Susan Strange Prize but also belated recognition of the wide-ranging and formative work of the women thinkers we recover and analyse in the book.
Susan Strange herself is often presented as a lone or exceptional woman in the history of international studies. But this recognition has sometimes obscured the intellectual work and institution-building of numerous other women international thinkers.
