Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought. Her new book, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, was published by Harvard University Press in spring 2018; it explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton 2005); co-editor of The Law of Nations in Global History (Oxford 2017); and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (Johns Hopkins 2001). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire; the history of international law; and global justice. She is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context. At the University of Chicago, she is a member of the faculty boards for the Human Rights Program and the Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge.
Reviews of Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire:
- Samuel Moyn, Political Theory
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0090591718800752 - Annette Gordon-Reed, TLS
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/empire-law/ - Michael Geyer, H-Diplo
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/2844428/geyer-pitts-boundaries-international-law-and-empire - John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/boundaries-international-law-and-empire
Selected Publications:
- “Striking Back,” review of Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire, Times Literary Supplement, December 5, 2017
- “International relations and the critical history of international law,” International Relations 31.3 (2017), 282-298.
- “International Law,” in Mark Bevir, ed., Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 237-261.
- "'That hippopotamus the American people': Livingston’s Damn Great Empires!,” Theory & Event 20.3 (2017), 861–866.
- “The Critical History of International Law,” Political Theory 43.4 (2015), 541–552.
- "Irony in Adam Smith's Critical Global History," Political Theory 45.2 (2017), 141–163 [online 2015].
- "Empire and legal universalisms in the eighteenth century," American Historical Review 117, No. 1 (February 2012), 92-121.
- "Political Theory and Empire," Annual Review of Political Science 13, (2010): 211-35.
Media Presentations
- "Boundaries of the International," on the Political Theory Review podcast
- "Tocqueville's America Revisited, Part 2," Ideas, CBC radio, Friday, October 21, 2016.
- “Tocqueville’s America Revisited, Part 1,” Ideas, CBC radio, Friday, October 14, 2016.
Visit Jennifer Pitts' Webpage
Pitts photo by Erielle Bakkum