News

DPIR’S Professor Patricia Owens elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Professor of International Relations Patricia Owens has been made a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in acknowledgement of her contribution to historical scholarship.

This is in part for the collaborative and interdisciplinary Leverhulme Trust Project on Women and the History of International Thought, for which Professor Owens is Principal Investigator. The research is largely archive-based, but also includes an oral history archive, created by the project’s postdoctoral associate, historian Sarah C. Dunstan, and public understanding through its Public Exhibition, which is still open in London.

Professor Owen’s first book, Between War and Politics, contributed to historical understandings of Hannah Arendt’s international political thought. Her second book, Economy of Force, was a political and intellectual history of twentieth-century Anglo-American counterinsurgency.

She is currently working on the single author monograph of the Leverhulme project, much delayed due to COVID-19, and hopes to share some of this new work early next year. 

Professor Owen’s research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought.

She is also a Co-Investigator on a Danish Council for Independent Research Project, a collaboration between scholars with expertise on war, visual methods, quantitative methods and AI/machine learning.

On being made a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she said: “This fellowship is special for me as someone working in a Politics and IR department.

“It’s lovely to be recognised by proper card-carrying historians for contributions to historical scholarship, especially because at the start of my A-levels, I made the catastrophic mistake of dropping History in favour of Economics!”

It’s lovely to be recognised by proper card-carrying historians for contributions to historical scholarship, especially because at the start of my A-levels, I made the catastrophic mistake of dropping History in favour of Economics!
Professor Patricia Owens