Jennifer Pitts

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her new book, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (HUP 2018) 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 co-edits the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context.

At the University of Chicago, she has taught seminars on wide-ranging topics in political theory and intellectual history, such as Liberalism and Empire, History of International Thought, Burke in an Age of Empire and Revolution, Approaches to the History of Political Thought, Global Justice, Liberalism confronts Democracy: Tocqueville and Mill. She is a member of the faculty boards for the Human Rights Program and the Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge.