Director of Research and PhD Studies

Senior Lecturer

BA, PhD (Manchester)

Contact Details

• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2799
• Fax: +44 (0)116 252 5082
• Email: lb21@leicester.ac.uk

Research Interests

My research interests are in the politics of property, and in particular concepts of self-ownership, commodification and slavery. I work on the idea of property in the history of political thought and in contemporary political theory to explore the limits of ideas about freedom, labour and belonging and their intersections with race, class and gender.

Current Research

I am currently exploring the politics of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery, and the discourses of abolition in the 1790s.

Recent Research Activities

The department will host a new ESRC seminar series on the Politics of Victimhood in 2011, and this builds on my recent keynote lecture ‘The Opposites of Slavery’ at the Human Rights, Victimhood and Consent Workshop in Bergen in June, and my recent book chapter on slavery, recognition and belonging.

PhD Supervision

I am keen to supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in political thinkers, especially Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and in political concepts, especially justice, the social contract and freedom as well as feminist theory and practice, property and self-ownership. I am currently supervising 'Environmental human rights’.

Teaching

• PL3121 The Politics of Slavery 

Most Recent Publications

Books

The Politics of Property (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Recent Journal Articles

• (2010) ‘The imprison’d absence of your liberty’: slavery, recognition and belonging’, in S. Thompson and M. Yar (eds) The Politics of Misrecognition (Ashgate, forthcoming)
• (2010) ‘Improving the Inside: Gender, Property and the 18th-Century Self’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 12:1, 111-126.
• 'Rousseau, Maternity and the Politics of Emptiness' (2007) Polity, vol. 39, no. 3
• 'The Social Contract' in G. Blakeley and V. Bryson, The impact of Feminism on Political Concepts and Debates (Manchester University Press, 2007).
• 'The tragedy of the freelance hustler: Hegel, gender and civil society' (2002) Contemporary Political Theory, vol 1, no.3.
• 'Husbanding the Earth and Hedging out the Poor' in J. McLaren, A. Buck and N. Wright (eds), Land and Freedom (Ashgate/ Dartmouth Press, 2001)
• '"Not empire, - but equality": Mary Wollstonecraft, the marriage state and the sexual contract' (2000) Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 8, no.4
  (with Julia O'Connell Davidson) 'Minding the Gap: General and Substantive
• 'Theorizing on Power and Exploitation' (2000) Signs, vol. 25, no. 4.