THE OXFORD BERLIN LECTURE with a response by Professor Claudia Bruns, Professor of Historical Anthropology and Gender Studies, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Patricia Owens will speak about her forthcoming book, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton, 2025). 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. 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. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Somerville College. She is the author of Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007), Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015), and Erased (Princeton, 2025), and the coeditor of Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge, 2021) and Women’s International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge, 2022).

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