Patricia Owens

07/29/22 • 109 min

Professor Patricia Owens joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast.
Professor Owens grew up in London, with Irish parents who'd emigrated from Ireland during the Troubles, and the conflict in Northern Ireland provided a background to her life and especially growing up. Patricia went to a Catholic school in South London until 16, and her Catholicism was less a 'religious' factor than it was a cultural and political identity that shaped her time growing up in England in those days. She talks about playing football from an early age, going to Bristol for uni, the very impactful time studying abroad in the mid-90s in Chapel Hill, NC, where she first encountered political theory, and was a tour manager for the local indie rock band June in 1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_(North_Carolina_band)
Professor Owens went to Cambridge for her Masters, then to Aberystwyth for her PhD. She reflects on that time and the fellowships and postdocs that happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the US academy, and how those shaped what she was interested in. But there was always Arendt, a theorist whose work influenced Prof Owens' throughout the 2000s (work that Brent connected with especially during his time at KU), and 2010s. Professor Owens talks about the Women in the History of International Thought project, a Leverhulme-funded project that has reconfigured our understanding of the history and historiography of International Thought (and IR):
https://whit.web.ox.ac.uk/home
She and Brent conclude with her thoughts on writing, decompressing, and more!

Previous Episode

Carla Martinez Machain

Professor Carla Martinez Machain joins the Hayseed Scholar Podcast. Professor Machain talks about growing up in Mexico, specifically outside of and then also in Mexico City, the schools she went to, her interests, doing Model UN and visiting The Hague during an overseas trip when Milosevic was on trial, and then deciding to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad. She talks about that transition, the decision to go to grad school at Rice instead of the other places she could have gone, how her graduate training included taking 3 years of classes, comps and then her dissertation. She reflects on presenting at conferences (which she says she didn’t enjoy back then but does now), and getting a tenure track position at Kansas State. She talks about getting settled in at K State and she and Brent discuss how her high productivity led her to go up early for tenure. Carla discusses how and why she eventually began to enjoy going to conferences, how she balances work and not working, how she approaches writing and her analysis and her ways of decompressing through running and cooking. The discussion concludes on the topic of her upcoming move to SUNY-Buffalo where she’ll be taking a position this fall, after a decade in Manhattan.

Next Episode

Alexander Barder

Professor Alexander Barder joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Barder was born in Paris, France, but he and his family moved to Miami very shortly thereafter. He traveled back to France often to visit family, and mainly spoke French until going to a bilingual school. His discussions with his grandpa about World War II sparked an interest in history, which, along with math, were his favorite subjects in school. Alex went to boarding school in Geneva his senior year of high school, worked at a bank and thought about finance or banking as a major. But after three semesters at American University in DC, he quite college, went back to Miami and worked various jobs (including brokering) for the next seven years. Alex chipped away at his undergraduate degree, finishing in Spring 2003 with a BS in Mathematics. He became interested in International Relations, and took an IR theory seminar, co-taught by Harry Gould and Nick Onuf, at FIU in the Spring of 2004 that got him interested in being an academic. After being wait listed that year for the PhD program at Johns Hopkins, Alex got in the following year and pursued his PhD studies there. He talks about writing and publishing with Francois Debrix, including his first book published by Routledge in the Interventions series in 2012. Alex got a job at American University of Beirut in 2013, where he and his family stayed until 2014, seeing first hand the impact of the nearby civil war in Syria. Alex returned to FIU as an Assistant Professor that year, where he has been ever since. They finish by chatting about how he approaches writing, his practices of decompressing and health, spending time with his family, and more!