This coming May (7-9), Dr. Torrey Shanks, Associate Professor of Political Science (UTSC) specializing in political theory, Dr. Mary Jo MacDonald (Jyväskylä University) and Dr. Geertje Bol (Ghent University) will be convening an international conference on Women in the History of Political Thought (WHPT) at Ghent University, Belgium.
Bringing together international scholars from Oxford, McGill, Duke, Barnard, University of Hawaii, Ghent, Toronto, and Jyväskyla, the aim of the conference is to highlight the understudied works of women in the field of political theory and to identify methods of interpretation that better account for the modes of women’s writings about political ideas.
The conference will be hosted at Het Rustpunt, a seventeenth-century Carmelite monastery turned hotel and event space. Five scholars from the University of Toronto will be presenting at the conference: Dr. Shanks, Dr. Menaka Philips, Dr. Jaby Matthews, and PhD candidates Devin Ouellette and Kelsey Gordon.
Professor Shanks gives more insight into the conference in a recent Q & A:
Tell us about your upcoming conference Women in the History of Political Thought.
The Women in the History of Political Thought (WHPT) conference in May is the first full conference of its kind that we've organized. It grows out of a collaboration between myself and my former PhD supervisee, Mary Jo Macdonald, (U of T, PhD, 2024) now a postdoctoral researcher at Jyväskyla University in Finland, and Geertje Bol, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (PhD, Oxford). We share research interests in women’s contributions to the history of political thought and find that there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. We each received funding through the Strategic Partnership Initiative between Ghent University and the University of Toronto, which we used to organize a workshop in Toronto in 2023 called “Women in the History of Poltiical Thought: Property, Labor, and Inheritance” which was held at the Centre for Ethics. With the success of this workshop, we were invited to apply for further funding through Ghent-Toronto partnership and received funds for a conference. Building on the financial support from Ghent and additional funding from the International Research Fund at UTSC and Jyväskylä University, we were awarded a SSHRC Connections grant. With all of this generous support, we are able to host an international conference of scholars working to understand and advance women’s contributions to political theory. The conference will bring together international scholars from Oxford, McGill, Duke, Barnard, University of Hawaii, Ghent, Toronto, and Jyväskyla, among others.
What is the primary goal of the conference?
The goal of the conference is to draw attention to the contributions that women have made throughout history to the development of political theory. If you scan the list of published articles in respected political science journals, you might not know that women wrote political theory before about 1950. The further back we go in history, the more we find that women’s contributions to political theory have been erased from the record. Historians and literary scholars tells us, however, that women have always written about political ideas; they just haven’t been remembered or appreciated for having done so. Still, there are currently no dedicated conferences or journals on this topic. We are trying to change that. We hope to organize recurring events to bring scholars together to discuss the latest research in this area and to build a scholarly network for mentoring graduate students, providing doctoral supervision, and collaborating on future research. All of these activities are essential to securing recognition of women’s long-standing contributions as political theorists.
The works of which women will be featured during the conference?
This conference is broad in its scope, including contributions from women from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, in European, North American, and Asian political thought and diverse ideological traditions including liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, and anticolonial thought. Presentations will focus on some better known theorists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges as well as earlier writers of the French and Italian Renaissance and seventeenth century England like Lucrezia Marinella, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell. More recent figures will include anarchists writing in China and Europe and anticolonial thinkers in India, such as Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai.
What are you looking forward to most, both professionally and personally?
I'm looking forward to supporting emerging scholars as they develop their exciting research agendas and build a bigger and more robust network of scholars, rediscovering the women of political theory that were written out of history books. I'm also eagerly anticipating the presentations on women in the context of empire and anticolonial projects. Scholarship in these areas has grown rapidly in recent years, and it is important that women’s contributions are recognized in those conceptual and political histories. It is a highlight of my career to work with PhD students as colleagues now, as they advance such exciting research agendas and build networks that I am lucky to be a part of.
For more information on the conference and the organizers, please visit the conference's website.