Jennifer Pitts

About

Jennifer Pitts is a Professor of Political Science and the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is also a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Her research interests include modern political and international thought, with a particular focus on British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, empire, the history of international law, and global justice. Pitts is the author of 'Boundaries of the International,' which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has also edited volumes such as the Cambridge History of Rights and a collection of essays and speeches by W.E.B. Du Bois on international thought. Additionally, she is the author of 'A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France,' and has co-edited works including 'The Law of Nations in Global History.' Pitts is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Ideas in Context' and is involved in various faculty boards at the university, including the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Human Rights Program, and the France Chicago Center.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 13 citations

  This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of e…

  DOI

• Empire and its afterlives

  Contemporary Political Theory · 2020-03-31 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-08-15 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The nineteenth century saw the rise of global imperial political structures and the advent of industrial capitalism, with its hierarchically structured global economy. European political control expanded from roughly a third of the earth's territory in 1815 to 85 percent in 1914. An economic "great divergence" between the economies of Europe and Asia, which had been comparable in their most advanced regions in the eighteenth century, opened in part thanks to European conquest of agricultural lan…

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: <i>Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World</i> , by Samuel Moyn

  Political Theory · 2018-12-14 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disclosing the Problem of Empire in Du Bois’s International Thought

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-06-21 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Du Bois’s understanding of the modern world order as founded on the linked phenomena of racial hierarchy, imperial domination, and capitalist exploitation constituted a radical challenge to the dominant conception of an international community of free and equal sovereign nations. He maintained that the rise of democracy in Europe and America had been parasitic on imperialism, with domestic structures, and politics, inextricable from their global context. Anticipating later theories of n…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lenore Schwankovsky

  4 shared

• Jeffrey Gering

  VA San Diego Healthcare System

  4 shared

• Ewa Atanassow

  4 shared

• Sylvia Adams

  4 shared

• Brian P. Schmitt

  4 shared

• Richard Bourke

  University of Cambridge

  3 shared

• Nicola A. Hanania

  3 shared

• Barbara P. Yawn

  University of Minnesota

  3 shared

Education

• PhD, Government

  Harvard University

  2000

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