And I was flummoxed. I had no names to give. I did ask around at the ISA and tended to get one or two names. With a bit of crowd-sourcing on twitter and somewhat broad criteria, we have three:
- Neta Crawford of Boston University who definitely counts as an IR scholar.
- Condoleeza Rice, who was a full prof at Stanford before becoming provost and then worst National Security Adviser.
- Jacqueline Braveboy Wagner, City College of New York (she was mentioned to me at the ISA but slipped my mind, my bad).
- Reeta Tremblay of U of Victoria who does South Asian politics stuff but can be included in IR if one defines the field broadly.
- L.H.M Ling of the New School.
- Katherine Moon of Wellesley.
- Zehra Arat of U of Connecticut
- Christine Chin of American U
- Saadia Pekkanen of U of Washington
- Nazli Choucri of MIT
- Sheila Nair of Northern Arizona U.
But it points to the larger problems: that there are still not that many women who are full professors as there is the leaky pipeline that means that women who enter the field may not make it to the highest rank; and there are not that many people of color in IR. Those that do enter political science are often directed to, pardon the phrase, ghettos of either race and ethnicity in American politics (and those folks don't tend to engage the comparativists who do ethnic politics stuff) or some area of the world with which they are identified. Even when one does not go that direction, they still get pushed:
My friend is of Chinese descent so when she serves on her program's admissions committee, she is asked to look at the files of for those interested in Chinese politics even though she has never studied it nor is all that interested in it.So, while there are more women doing IR and more tenured women, there are few at the most senior levels and very few who are not white. So, women of color have few role models and mentors. And that sucks.
This page has been and will be updated as people tell me what I missed/messed up.
Update: Thus far, the new names listed tend to be post-positivist people and/or mostly area studies people. One thing my friend noticed is that people of color are expected to study "their" region so we have few people who have never written about the part of the world with which they are identified. Some things to think about. Oh, and so far, the new names are Asian-Americans but no Latinas and only the three African-Americans that started the list. So, there are some role models but not many.