Jennifer Pitts
Jennifer Pitts Office: Pick Hall 404 Phone: 773 702 8868 Email Interests:
  • Political theory
  • History of political thought
  • Empire and international justice
Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science; Professor, John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought and Chair of the department of Political Science. She is the author of Boundaries of the International (Harvard 2018), which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the co-editor, with Adom Getachew, of W.E.B. Du Bois, International Thought, a collection of essays and speeches spanning the years 1900-1956 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 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 Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Human Rights Program, and the France Chicago Center

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Selected Publications
Media Presentations