Up Against Erasure | Patricia Owens Book Talk

Patricia Owens Book Talk: Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men.

How did women help create the study of international relations, and why were they subsequently written out of its history? Drawing on her book Erased, Patricia Owens explores the ideas, lives, and work of women who shaped the field in twentieth-century Britain. Moving between universities and other centers of intellectual and political life, she examines how gender, race, and institutional power shaped both the production of knowledge and the histories later told about it. The talk considers what recovering these women’s contributions reveals about intellectual erasure and the possibilities for rethinking the history of international thought.

Patricia Owens FBA FRHistS is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, 2026–29.