Prof Jenny Edkins
Emeritus Professor
Contact Details
- Email: jee44@aber.ac.uk
- Office:International Politics Building
- Twitter: @jennyedkins.bsky.social
- Research Portal Profile (https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/persons/1505a984-41a4-4fb8-b2a5-ba7988d3f7d3)
Jenny Edkins has taught at Aberystwyth University, the Open University and the University of Manchester. Her original first degree at the University of Oxford, where she held a Nuffield Open Scholarship at St Anne's College, was in physics, with specialisms in nuclear and solid state physics. Between 1985 and 1993 she studied for a second first degree at the Open University, this time in the social sciences, and the courses she took there with Stuart Hall continue to inspire her work. She obtained her PhD from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1997, and her first full-time academic post was a one-year temporary lectureship at the University of Manchester. In 1997, she joined the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University with a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship and an ESRC Research Grant. She was appointed to a personal chair in Aberystwyth in 2004. With colleagues at Aberystwyth, she established and taught the MA Postcolonial Politics from 1999-2016 and the MA Politics, Media and Performance from 2013-2018, and co-founded an Interdisciplinary Research Centre, Performance and Politics international. She left to return to the University of Manchester in 2018. In 2021 she was awarded the British International Studies Association Distinguished Contribution Prize and was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester and Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth.
Jenny Edkins has had a sustained focus on collaborative ventures that make space for innovative approaches and bring together those engaged in developing them, including most recently the Gregynog Ideas Lab; the highly-regarded Routledge book series Interventions; and the Journal of Narrative Politics. She has contributed to NGO and UK government policy discussions on famine, emergency and missing people. In 2013, she talked about her work in an interview with Stuart Elden. The collaborative work with activists, poets, photographers and academics that led to the two books After Grenfell and When This Is Over was particularly challenging and productive.
In addition to her academic work, Jenny Edkins is a published poet. Her first poem, 'As it turned out' appeared in Planet Magazine (235) to mark thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others have appeared in Acumen, Contexto Internacional, Journal of Narrative Politics, Ink Sweat & Tears, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and Notes and Records among others. She has written about the poetry of witness in The Sociological Review.
Jenny Edkins' most recent book is the fourth edition of the successful textbook, Global Politics: A New Introduction, co-edited with Maja Zehfuss and Tom Gregory, published in January 2025. She has also published a co-edited volume with Policy Press (2023), When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic, which takes stock of the inequalities, injustices and tensions of the UK's pandemic politics. Her piece 'Did we really think we'd moved on from Covid?' in the blog Transforming Society draws on and develops one of the arguments of this volume.
Other recent books include: the Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations; her sixth monograph, Change and the Politics of Certainty (Manchester University Press, 2019), available on open access; and a collection of essays, images and poems from scholars, artists and activists entitled After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019), co-edited with Dan Bulley and Nadine El-Enany and first reviewed here. She has published twelve other books, including five more monographs: Face Politics (Routledge, 2015); Missing: Persons and Politics (Cornell, 2011); Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, 2003); Whose Hunger: Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minnesota, 2008); and Poststructuralism and International Relations (Lynne Rienner, 1999).
Jenny Edkins' research interests revolve around questions of personhood, politics and justice in a postcolonial world. She has examined these questions through empirical investigations in a series of contexts such as:
- Missing persons and enforced disappearance
- Forensic investigations
- Trauma, memory and resistance
- Famine aid
- Humanitarian intervention
- Facial recognition, expression and disfigurement
- Disaster politics and inequality
- Algorithmic life
She is interested in autoethography, autobiography, poetry and narrative methods. Her work has drawn on postcolonialism (Fanon), Marxism, psychoanalytic approaches (Žižek, Lacan) and feminism (Butler) alongside others.
In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30.07.2026.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/Debate
In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 53, No. 3, 10.09.2025, p. 575–602.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
When This Is Over: Reflections on an unequal pandemic. ed. / Amy Cortvriend; Lucy Easthope; Jenny Edkins; Kandida Purnell. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2023. p. 24-41.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Bristol University Press, 2023. 360 p.
Research output: Book/Report › Book
In: Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 4, 30.08.2022, p. 700-710.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review