International Women's Day Lecture

About the Lecture

From the 1902 Australian banner that anthropomorphised Australia gentle admonishing the UK to grant women suffrage as the colony had already done to the present day, Australia’s leadership has once more emerged with regard to women, specifically with reference to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda catalysed by UNSCR 1325 in 2000. 

During this lecture, Prof Hudson provides an American perspective on Australia and WPS. She’ll discuss her views of the essential role of women’s empowerment in defining and ensuring national and international security and stabilising nations.

About the Speaker

Valerie M. Hudson is the George H.W. Bush Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University where she directs the Program on Women, Peace and Security. She is the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s ‘Australia and the World’ Visiting Fellow at ANU. She has previously taught at Brigham Young, Northwestern, and Rutgers universities. Her research foci include foreign policy analysis, security studies, gender and international relations, and methodology. Hudson’s articles have appeared in such journals as International Security, the American Political Science Review, Population and Development Review, the Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Foreign Policy Analysis, as well as policy journals such as Foreign Policy and Politico. She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography, resulting in feature stories in the New York Times, The Economist, 60 Minutes, and other news publications. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009, and in 2015 was recognized as Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA/ISA) and awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship as well as an inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Australian National University (2017). Winner of numerous teaching awards and recipient of a National Science Foundation research grant and a Minerva Initiative grant, she served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies for eight years, and served as Vice President of the International Studies Association for 2011-2012. Hudson is one of the Principal Investigators of The WomanStats Project (http://womanstats.org), which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today. She is also a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis, and a current or former editorial board member of Politics and Gender, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and the International Studies Review, has testified three times before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, assisted the National Intelligence Council in preparing its 2017 Global Trends: Paradox of Progress report, and served as a member of the Expert Group on the Data 2X Initiative. Her book Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett, and published by Columbia University Press, was listed by Gloria Steinem in 2014 as one of the top three books on her “Reading Our Way to the Revolution” list. Hudson’s most recent book with Patricia Leidl, also from Columbia University Press, is entitled The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy (2015). Her latest coauthored book project is The First Political Order: Sex, Governance, and National Security, forthcoming in 2019 with Columbia University Press.