Christine Sylvester

Professor Emeritus

Political Science

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Critical International Relations; War as Experience; Art/Museums/Memorials and International Relations

Christine Sylvester is professor of political science at UConn and is affiliated with the School of Global Studies, The University of Gothenburg Sweden. A native of Connecticut, she also holds Australian citizenship and has worked extensively outside the USA, including at the Australian National University (Canberra), The Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, Netherlands), and Lancaster University (UK). She was awarded the Swedish Research Council’s Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship for Sweden for 2010-2011. Other awards include a Leverhulme fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, The University of London; the Susan Northcutt Award of the International Studies Association (ISA); Eminent Scholar of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the ISA; the inaugural Ann Tickner Award of the ISA, and ISA Vice-President. She was also named one of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, Martin Griffiths, Steven Roach, M. Scott Solomon, eds. (Routledge, 2008), and has regularly given lectures at the United Nations University, Tokyo. Her most recent research and writings are on the state of theory in International Relations, war as experience, and art/museums and international relations. She is the editor of the Routledge book series: War, Politics, Experience. In 2014 Lund University awarded her an honorary doctorate in the social sciences, and in 2016 she was selected as a faculty fellow of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Her most recent invited talks include the Barcelona Institute for International Studies and Cardiff University in 2021, and Central European University Vienna, York University UK, and the University of Warsaw in 2022, along with a Q&A for graduate students at the London School of Economics.

Recent Books

Curating and Re-curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Masquerades of War, editor (London: Routledge, 2015).

War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (Routledge, 2013).

Experiencing War, editor (Routledge, 2011).

Feminist International Relations: The Key Works, editor of 5 volumes (Routledge, 2010).

Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It (Paradigm, 2009).

Earlier Books

Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe (Heinemann, 2000).

Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Zimbabwe: The Terrain of Contradictory Development (Westview, 1991).

Transformations in the Global Political Economy, co-editor (St. Martin’s, 1990).

Recent Articles

“Making Memorials to the Future,” Global Studies Quarterly. Forthcoming.

“Does Iraq War Art Need the ‘Event’?” Political Geography, 2022.

“National War Heritage at the Australian War Memorial and Hiroshima Peace Park,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2021.

“Who Curates Recent American Wars? Looking in Arlington Cemetery and at The Wall That Heals,” Critical Military Studies, 2019.

“Curating and Re-Curating America’s War in Vietnam,” Security Dialogue, firstview November 2017, print version 2018.

“Thinking like an Artist-Researcher About War,” co-author Jill Gibbon, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45, 2, 2017: 249-257.

“Contending with Women and War,” Politics and Gender, 11, 3, 2015: 586-596.

“Neorealist Reductionisms,” Australian Journal of Political Science, 49, 3, 2014: 547-552.

“TerrorWars: Boston/Iraq,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 7,1, 2014: 11-23.

“Experiencing the End and Afterlives of IR,” European Journal of International Relations, 19, 3, 2013: 599 -616.

“The Elusive Arts of Reflexivity in the “Sciences” of IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41, 2, 2013: 209-225.

“Passing American Security,” International Studies Perspectives, 14, 4, 2013: 444-446.

“Experiencing War: A Challenge for IR,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26, 4, 2013: 669-674.

“War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40, 3, 2012: 480-503.

Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher, editor, International Studies Review, 13, 4, 2011: 687-708.

“Tensions in Feminist Security Studies,” Security Dialogue, 41, 6, 2010: 607-614.

Recent Chapters

 “Memorializing the Enemy Three Ways: Australia, Japan, USA,” for Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare edited by Holly Furneaux and Matilda Greig (Palgrave Macmillan). Forthcoming.

“Afterwards,” Gendered States Revisited, Swati Parashar, Ann Tickner, Jacqui True eds. (Oxford University Press), 2018: 191-196.

“Creativity” in Aoileann Ni Mhurchu and Reiko Shindo, eds. Critical Imaginations in IR (Routledge), 2016: 56-69.

“Will IR Be Quite So Abstract in the Future?” in Ken Booth and Toni Erskine, eds. International Relations Theory Today and in the Future (Pennsylvania State University Press), 2016: 258-262.

“Avoiding the ‘Killing’ of Lives: representations in academia and fiction,” in Studying the Agency of Being Governed, Stina Hansson, Sofie Hellberg with Maria Stern, eds. (Routledge, 2014): 64-74.

“Post-colonialism,” in Steve Smith, John Baylis, and Patricia Owens, eds. The Globalisation of World Politics, 5th (2010) and 6th editions (Oxford University Press –Oxford Textbooks in International Relations), 2014: 184-197.

“Power, Security, and Antiquities,” in Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear, International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (Routledge, 2013): 203-220.

“Development and Postcolonial Takes on Biopolitics and Economy, in Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan, Alex Hughes, eds. Postcolonial Economies: Rethinking Material Lives (Zed, 2011): 185-204.

“Feminism(s) Troubling the Boundaries of IR,” ISA Compendium project, University of Michigan Press and online at ISA, 2010.

“The Contemporary ‘Mahabharata’ and the Many ‘Draupadis’: Bringing Gender to Critical Terrorism Studies,” with Swati Parashar, in Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth, Jeroen Gunning, eds. Critical Terrorism Studies (Routledge, 2009):178-193.