In discussion: Patricia Owens

BISA is run by a board of trustees who make up our Executive Committee. They have expertise and interests that represent the main areas of our activity and a breadth of experience from the wider world. We hope this interview series will help you get to know them a little better. This time it's the turn of Professor Patricia Owens who is based at the University of Oxford.

Tell us a bit about yourself and where you are from.

I was born in London into a working-class Irish immigrant family and was the first person in my family to go to university. I’ve studied and worked at several universities in Britain and the United States, but much of my intellectual life has been shaped by British international studies and by IR traditions that move between history, political thought and the study of contemporary world politics. Right now, I’m Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford.

Why did you want to be a BISA trustee and what do you hope to achieve during your term?

BISA has been part of my scholarly life for more than 25 years and has been very good to me, and supportive of my work. I also think professional associations matter enormously. BISA does something very important in sustaining the scholarly community across institutions, career stages and different approaches to the field - particularly right now with enormous pressures on universities, jobs and academic freedom, and multiple global crises.

I wanted to become a trustee because I’d like to contribute directly to the field’s collective life. I care very strongly about the values that make BISA distinctive: intellectual breadth; professional generosity; and being an organisation in which early-career colleagues can find networks and support. I hope I can help BISA remain intellectually plural and inclusive, while also responding practically to the very difficult institutional and political environment in which many of our members are now working.

What is your area of research and how did you get into it? What are you currently working on?

My work sits between IR, history, and political thought/theory. I’m interested in how people have understood and organised international politics: war and political violence, empire and decolonisation, race and gender, and how the academic field of IR itself came to define what counted as legitimate knowledge.

I initially came into this through political theory. That led me towards the history of ideas about war and violence in Hannah Arendt’s thought, then to historical work on counterinsurgency and ideas and practices of 'the social', and eventually to the history of IR and international thought itself. I now think of myself primarily as an historian in IR. I’m very drawn to archives and to reconstructing intellectual lives and relationships that don’t fit the standard disciplinary narratives, including through work on the Leverhulme Project on Women and the History of International Thought with Kim Hutchings and Katharina Rietzler.

I’m now beginning a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship during which I’ll write an intellectual biography of Dame Margery Perham. She was an historian, theorist, practitioner and educator of colonial and postcolonial statecraft, probably the most influential white British thinker on empire in its final decades. Biography is a new and exciting genre for me. IR has long relied on accounts of individual lives but has not, by and large, theorised biography as a methodology. I see it as a distinctive way of studying the dynamic relationship through which a life and the world it inhabits shape one another over time.

You’ve received numerous best book and article awards across multiple disciplines – congratulations! What advice would you give to early-career academics who are working on their first article or book?

The first thing I would say is to try to write the article or book that you really want to read and that you think needs to exist. Read beyond your immediate subfield. Some of the most useful ideas in my own work have come from historians, political theorists, feminists and people who would never describe themselves as IR scholars. For a first book especially, I’d say give yourself permission to be changed by the research. That was definitely the case for me with my last book. The book you end up writing does not have to be the book you imagined when you began. And revise relentlessly: the clarity of an argument usually emerges through rewriting rather than arriving fully formed at the beginning.

In your recent book Erased, you demonstrate that women were actively present during the formation of international thought but were subsequently written out. What was the most shocking instance or mechanism of deliberate erasure you uncovered in the archives?

What shocked me most was how routinely women’s intellectual labour could be erased by converting it into male authority and reputation. A particularly stark example is Lucie Zimmern’s because her intellectual labour was absorbed into the reputation of a husband who became one of IR’s canonical 'founding fathers'. Lucie was not simply Alfred Zimmern’s wife: she was an intellectual, writer, translator, editor, cultural broker and an important internationalist actor in her own right. In the 1920s she helped establish and effectively ran the Geneva School of International Studies, sustaining its everyday work and the networks on which its influence depended. She also played a central part in the intellectual and political world that was later mythologised as IR’s “first great debate”, especially in her confrontation with Nicholas Spykman, a later founder of 'realism'. Yet once the history of the discipline came to be written through named male theorists, Alfred Zimmern and Nicholas Spykman, precisely the intellectual debates and forms of work Lucie performed were pushed out. Alfred became a disciplinary founder; Lucie became his wife.

Is there anything else we should know about you? 

I love watching women’s football with my youngest daughter. We support Arsenal Women, often going to the stadium, and Ireland Women, and my republican aunties in the north of Ireland said it was okay to support the Lionesses, so I support them too. I used to play football, many years ago, and was once urged by a scout not to go to university but to join a bigger London club instead. I was then playing for Crystal Palace and later played at Bristol and Cambridge universities. Had girls and women enjoyed today’s infrastructure and support in the early 1990s, I might have had a very different life—and might not now be a BISA trustee!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash