Description:

Please join the “How I Wrote [Title Here]” Event Series and the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Joanne Yao, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order.

The ideal river examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics.

In “How I Wrote [Title Here]” we invite scholars to campus to discuss how they turned a research project into a book. Each session features a writer and their recent book. Some are first-time authors, navigating the process from dissertation to publication. Others are well-established scholars with deep experience and diverse perspectives. We will talk about the choices the authors made in research, presentation, and marketing, and the choices that were made for them by circumstances, publishers, and reviewers. The series aims to share stories about the making of scholarly books.

Joanne Yao joined QMUL in 2019. Previously, she taught at Durham University and the LSE, where she completed her PhD in 2017. In addition, she has worked in the US public sector and for international nongovernmental organizations including CARE International. Her research centers on environmental history and politics, historical international relations, international hierarchies and orders, and the development of early international organizations. Her first book, The Ideal River (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines the construction of the ‘ideal river’ in the European geographical imagination and the establishment of the first international organizations. Joanne’s next project focuses on the history of Antarctica and early outer space exploration. Joanne was also one of three editors of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 43 (2014-2015) and is currently a member of Millennium’s Board of Trustees.