Professor Patricia Owens FBA

Summary

Patricia Owens FBA is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College. Her work sits at the intersection of international relations, intellectual history, political thought, and the history of war and security. She is especially known for recovering and reinterpreting traditions of international thought marginalised by the discipline, including the work of women and scholars writing outside the conventional canon.

She is author or editor of six books, including 'Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt' (Oxford 2007); 'Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social' (Cambridge 2015), winner of the BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize and the ISA Theory Section Best Book Award; and 'Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men' (Princeton 2025), which shows that women were present in the formation of international thought and were later written out of the field’s histories. 'Erased' has received four major prizes from APSA, BISA and the International Studies Association.

Owens was principal investigator of the Leverhulme-funded Women and the History of International Thought project (2018-23), and co-curator of public exhibitions at LSE Library on women’s international thought and the centenary of the Women’s Library. She is co-editor of 'The Globalization of World Politics', a leading undergraduate textbook in International Relations. She has held fellowships and visiting positions at Harvard, Sydney, UCLA, Berkeley, Princeton, and USC, and is currently writing an intellectual biography of Dame Margery Perham as a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow.