Our Fellow and Tutor in International Relations, Professor Patricia Owens, has won the Britis International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Prize for Best Book in International Series – the second time she has received the award.
BISA announced the award today at their annual conference. The winning book, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (2022), was co-edited by Professor Owens, joined in the editorial team by Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan. The extensive anthology explores how women transformed the field of international relations in the 20th century, taking on the historical distortion of male-centred narratives in the subject by offering an alternative canon, comprised of 104 extracts from 92 different thinkers.
Authors featured include the award’s dedicatee Susan Strange alongside thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, and Ayn Rand. Several Somervillians appear in the book, such as alumna and the first woman to be a full Professor at Oxford, Agnes Headlam-Morley (1921, Modern History); author and pacifist Vera Brittain (1915, English) and philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1946 Mary Somerville Junior Research Fellow; 1951 Lecturer; 1964-9 Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy).
The aim of the Susan Strange Prize is to recognise exceptional work in the field and, in doing so, honour the legacy of Susan Strange, one of the influential figures in British International Studies and the former Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at LSE. Strange also served as the first female President of the International Studies Association, and was a founding member and the first Treasurer of the BISA.
The selections cover a substantial range of subject matter, ideologies, and politics within the field, and show how women were central to the early development of international relations discourse, and how they were excluded from its history and conceptualisation.
It’s a groundbreaking, timely and important piece of work – congratulations Patricia to you and your colleagues!
Professor Patricia Owens
The winning book, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon