Jennifer G. Pitts
jpitts@uchicago.edu

773-702-8868

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Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science. She is author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton 2005) 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 currently at work on a book, tentatively entitled Boundaries of the International, which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 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 Nicholson Center for British Studies and a member of the Women's Leadership Council.

Selected Publications:
"Hobson's Imperialism: A Reconsideration," Raritan forthcoming.

"Liberalism and empire in a nineteenth-century Algerian mirror," Modern Intellectual History 6.2 (2009), pp. 287-313 [pdf].

Constant's Thought on Empire and Slavery," in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Constant, ed. Helena Rosenblatt, Cambridge 2009, pp. 115-45.

Boundaries of Victorian International Law," in Victorian Visions of Global Order, ed. Duncan Bell, Cambridge 2007, pp. 67-8.

Legislator of the world? A rereading of Bentham on India," Political Theory 31.2 (2003), 200-234.