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Rawls on international justiceIn Ruth Abbey (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls, Pennsylvania State University Press. 2013.
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4Frankenstein and the Question of Children’s Rights After Human Germline Genetic ModificationIn Lisa Campo-Engelstein & Paul Burcher (eds.), Reproductive Ethics Ii: New Ideas and Innovations, Springer Verlag. pp. 9-24. 2018.Prominent critics and skeptics of genetic engineering have treated the ethical issue of human germline genetic modification as if it were still science fiction, like the artificially made Creature imagined in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. After surveying the history of making genetically modified children through three-person IVF since the late 1990s, I sketch a framework for a normative political theory of the rights of the GM children made from heritable biotechnological intervention…Read more
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Reflection : Is Frankenstein's Creature a Human with Rights? Conceptualizing the Rights of the Child After Genetic EngineeringIn Karolina Hübner (ed.), Human: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Oxford University Press. 2022.
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26Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: the international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men_ in the _Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791History of European Ideas 47 (8): 1304-1314. 2021.Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than previously documented. …Read more
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19A novel (coronavirus) reading of Hobbes's LeviathanHistory of European Ideas 47 (1): 33-37. 2021.ABSTRACT In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healthy global body politic can be teased out …Read more
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58Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to Modern Political Philosophy: Intersectionality and the Quest for Egalitarian Social JusticeIn Eileen O’Neill & Marcy P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Springer. pp. 355-377. 2019.This chapter provides the first analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s major contributions to modern political philosophy stem from her visionary use of the concept of intersectionality to diagnose the causes, symptoms, and remedies of gender-, race-, and class-based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft’s theory of social justice—the most egalitarian of the Enlightenment era—aimed to eliminate such arbitrary inequalities, in part th…Read more
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106Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’History of European Ideas 45 (8): 1125-1142. 2019.ABSTRACT Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelle…Read more
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32The Wollstonecraftian Mind (edited book)Routledge. 2019.There has been a rising interest in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in philosophy, political theory, literary studies and the history of political thought in recent decades. The Wollstonecraftian Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of her work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising 38 chapters by a team of international contributors this handbook covers: the background to Wollstonecraft’s work Wollstonec…Read more
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38Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in FrankensteinUniversity of Pennsylvania. 2017.From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic re…Read more
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50Religion and women’s rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the multiple feminist liberal traditionsHistory of European Ideas 44 (8): 1169-1188. 2018.ABSTRACTWe trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson, and J.S. Mill; her teaching notes on Wol…Read more
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32Women’s Human Rights, Then and Now: Symposium on Eileen Hunt Botting’s Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human RightsPolitical Theory 46 (3): 426-454. 2018.
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75Westernization and Women’s RightsPolitical Theory 40 (4): 466-496. 2012.The publication in 1869 of Mill’s Subjection of Women gave rise to philosophical and political responses beyond Western Europe on the relationship between Westernization and women’s rights in developing, colonial, and post-colonial countries. Through the first comparative study of the Subjection of Women alongside the forewords to six of its earliest non–Western European editions, we explore how this book provoked local intellectuals in Russia, Chile, and India to engage its liberal utilitarian,…Read more
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26The early Rousseau’s egalitarian feminism: a philosophical convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’History of European Ideas 43 (7): 732-744. 2017.ABSTRACTFeminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the 1750s. I add to the evidence of the early …Read more
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313Women’s Human Rights, Then and Now: Symposium on Eileen Hunt Botting’s Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) (review)Political Theory 46 (3): 426-454. 2018.
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68Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception HistoryHistory of European Ideas 39 (4): 503-527. 2013.Summary It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from …Read more
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36Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human RightsYale University Press. 2016.How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth ce…Read more
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33A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (edited book)Yale University Press. 2014.Mary Wollstonecraft’s visionary treatise, originally published in 1792, was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal human rights. Ideal for coursework and classroom study, this comprehensive edition of Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking feminist argument includes illuminating essays by leading scholars that highlight the author’s significant contributions to modern political philosophy, making a powerful case for her as one of the most substantive political thinkers of the…Read more
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11Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (edited book)Pennsylvania State University Press. 2009.This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative sch…Read more
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46Making an american feminist icon: Mary Wollstonecraft's reception in us newspapers, 1800-1869History of Political Thought 34 (2): 273-295. 2013.This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in American newspapers from 1800 to 1869. Wollstonecraft was portrayed to the American public as a philosopher of women's rights, a new model of femininity, and a pioneer of women's political activism. Although these iconic uses of Wollstonecraft were regularly negative, they grew more positive as the women's rights movement gained steam alongside the abolition movement
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |