Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations. She went to a state school in London and, as the first in her family to go to university, did not even think to apply to Oxbridge. For undergraduate admissions, she particularly welcomes applications from students at non-selective state schools.
Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. She was Principal Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought and a Co-Investigator on a Danish Council for Independent Research Project.
Her forthcoming book Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men will be published by Princeton University Press in late 2024.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, women played a prominent role in the creation of a new cross-disciplinary intellectual field in imperial Britain: ‘international relations’. Born of crises of Empire, this new field of knowledge relied on women’s intellectual labours and expertise on empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Figures such as Margery Perham, Eileen Power, Merze Tate, Claudia Jones, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange were among the leading international thinkers of their generation. Many others shaped the development of the new field as scholars, journalists, public intellectuals and information managers, as heterosexual spouses and in intimate partnerships between women. Patricia Owens interweaves interpersonal, institutional, and intellectual stories of a cohort of women to recast the history of international relations in a new kind of critical disciplinary history. Using archival sources, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men returns to key moments and locations in the effort to form international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. Challenging existing histories in which women and people of colour are missing, Erased includes the thinkers, fields, and approaches against which a small group of men tried to redefine international relations, revealing the intellectual and institutional practices of misogyny and racism in its earliest institutions. With a story of power, knowledge, and erasure, Owens offers a new diagnosis of international relations’ failure as an intellectual project and sources for its renewal.
Patricia's most recent monograph, Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015) won BISA's Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in International Studies, the ISA Theory Section Best Book Award, and was Runner up for the Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical IR. Her co-edited volume Women's International Thought: A New History (Cambridge 2021) won the ISA History Section Prize for Best Edited Volume and the ISA's Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume. And the co-edited volume Women's International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge 2022) won the ISA Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume. An article with Kim Hutchings won APSA's Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory for Best Article in English Language.
Her first book was on war in the thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007).
She is a former Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; Jane Eliza Proctor Research Fellow at Princeton; Visiting Kathleen Fitzpatrick Professor in History at Sydney; Seton-Watson Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford; Visiting Professor at UCLA; Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley; and Postdoctoral Fellow at USC.
Patricia is co-editor of the leading undergraduate textbook in IR, The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford, 2023), OUP's highest selling social science textbook, now in its 9th edition and translated into nine languages. With former colleagues at Sussex, she was co-editor of the European Journal of International Relations and now sits on the editorial boards of EJIR, Security Dialogue and Political Studies. She was previously on the boards of the Journal of International Political Theory and Humanity and was managing editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs during her MPhil at Cambridge.
Professional Responsibilities
Patricia is a Tutorial Fellow of Somerville College, sitting on its Governing Body, Standing Committee. She is Director of Research Methods for International Relations.
During 2018, Patricia was consultant on a project on Hannah Arendt at the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission. In Spring 2022, she co-curated a Public Exhibition on women's international thought in London.
Research
Patricia was the Director of the Leverhulme Research Project Grant, Women and the History of International Thought. This multidisciplinary and multi-methodological project systematically recovered and evaluated the international thought of women both inside and outside academe during the early to long mid-twentieth-century, focusing on Britain and the United States. Already published work and forthcoming work includes edited volumes, multiple journal articles, a monograph, doctoral dissertation, new Oral History archive and web resource, multiple journal special sections and roundtables on the Project, and a Public Exhibition in London. Patricia's co-investigators were Katharina Rietzler and Kimberly Hutchings.
She was also Co-Investigator on a Danish Council for Independent Research (2019-2024) project on images. Bodies as Battleground: Gender Images and International Security is led by Professor Lene Hansen (Copenhagen).
Patricia's research interests include Political Theory, Gender, Political thought and ideologies, Feminism, Gender, History, International relations, Power.
Teaching
Patricia teaches Somerville PPE undergraduates the core IR paper and the two historical papers, IR in the Era of World Wars and IR during the Cold War. She teaches IR MPhils students part of the core paper, The Development of the International System, and the optional course, Historical and Interpretive Methods.
She received a Teaching Excellence Award from the Social Science Teaching Audit at Oxford and was nominated for university-wide teaching awards at QMUL and Sussex.
Patricia welcomes applications from prospective DPhil students working across a range of IR themes and approaches to twentieth-century international history and theory, disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. She is particularly keen to supervise projects that overlap with her current research projects.
