Professor V. Spike Peterson

V. Spike Peterson is a Professor of International Relations in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Institute for LGBT Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and International Studies.  

She was also honored to receive the 2018 LGBTQA Scholar Award by the LGBTQA Caucus of the International Studies Association, which recognizes her long-standing and pioneering research in queer approaches to IR and IPE. In 2016 she received the Charles A. McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Political Science Association.

Her book publications include Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2010) and two earlier editions of Global Gender Issues (1999, 1993) with Anne Sisson Runyan; her own A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003); and Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (1992), which she contributed to and edited. She has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, most recently on informalizations of work in relation to structural inequalities and their corollary insecurities worldwide; global householding; gendering war and its economies; and critical queering of marriage, citizenship, migration and states/nations.

Professor Peterson currently serves on the editorial boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics; Globalizations; Journal of Women, Politics and Policy; New Political Science; Politics & Gender; and Perspectives: The Review of International Affairs. She received the SBS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Upper Division Teaching (2014), the Magellan Circle Award for Teaching Excellence (2008) and the Provost’s General Education Teaching Award (2001) at the University of Arizona, as well as the national Mentor Award of the Society for Women in International Political Economy (2000). She regularly teaches undergraduate courses in Politics and Theory that are cross-listed with Gender and Women’s Studies, and graduate seminars on contemporary social theory and global political economy.

Further information about Professor Peterson and her research can be found here.