The Duck of Minerva

Brent Steele

Brent Steele

Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair, Department Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, and the co-editor in chief of Global Studies Quarterly. He is the author of the recently published Vicarious Identity in International Relations (with Chris Browning and Pertti Joenniemi), and Restraint in International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which co-won the ISA Theory section book award for 2020.

Recent Posts

Carla Martinez Machain

Carla Martinez Machain

by | 3 June, 2022 | ,

Professor Carla Martinez Machain joins the Hayseed Scholar Podcast. Professor Machain talks about growing up in Mexico, specifically outside of and then also in Mexico City, the schools she went to, her interests, doing Model UN and visiting The Hague during an overseas trip when Milosevic was on trial, and then deciding to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad. She talks about that transition, the decision to go to grad school at Rice instead of the other places she could have gone, how her graduate training included taking 3 years of classes, comps and then her dissertation. She...

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Carla Martinez Machain

Duncan Bell

by | 17 May, 2022 | , ,

Professor Duncan Bell joins The Hayseed Scholar podcast. Duncan grew up in the Midlands in a rural area of England. He was interested in international politics from a fairly young age. Duncan chose to pursue a degree in war studies at King's College London, and considered joining the military thereafter. But the transition to London from a quieter area, and the experiences he had there, changed his plans. He tells Brent about getting his Master's and then PhD at Cambridge, and a momentous year he spent in the US at Columbia during his studies and changing his PhD topic that led to several of...

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State Consciousness and Ontological Security

State Consciousness and Ontological Security

by | 10 February, 2022 | ,

I appreciate this opportunity to remark on Adam Lerner’s (hereafter, just ‘Adam’), excellent 2020 International Theory article on state consciousness. I recall first chatting with Adam about this paper when it was still in development, over a coffee in Prague at the 2018 European International Studies Association (EISA) annual meeting. Some of what I’ll mention here will be a rehashing – but also rethinking – of what I told him then.  To cut to the chase, I still maintain my skepticism regarding how Adam’s article, and those like it, will be received in certain corners of International...

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Carla Martinez Machain

Xymena Kurowska

by | 20 January, 2022 | ,

ymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local transition. She discusses what it was like to move around to 'closed' cities in a military family, having a father who served in the Polish military and also in a UN peacekeeping operation in Southern Lebanon. Xymena recalls how a karate injury almost kept her out of going to a university, and how she came to study International Relations. She reflects on what Warsaw was like in the late 1990s, getting her...

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