Join us for this special event with Patricia Owens, who will discuss her new book Erased: A History of International Thought.

The event will be followed by an audience Q&A and a drinks reception.

“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. In Erased, Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. 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 finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. 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.”

Speaker and chair bios

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College. She is author of Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton 2025), Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015), and Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007). She was Director of the multi-award winning and interdisciplinary Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought. With Katharina Rietzler, she co-edited, Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge 2021) and with Kimberly Hutchings, Sarah C. Dunstan, and Rietzler, she co-edited Women’s International Thought: Towards A New Canon (Cambridge 2022). She has published articles in American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Modern Intellectual History, The International History Review, European Journal of International Relations, and others.

James Ashley Morrison is Professor in the Department of International Relations and Deputy Head of Department (Teaching and Learning) at LSE. He specialises in International Political Economy. Prior to his start at LSE, he was an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College (2008-2013) and a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2012-2013). He has a PhD in Political Science and a Master’s in History from Stanford University. He is also an alumnus of the University of Chicago (graduated 2003), a member of Trinity College at Cambridge University (matriculated 2002), and was an Associate Member of Nuffield College at Oxford University.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.