Political Science and Public Administration

Faculty & Staff

Dr. Renée Heberle

Professor of Political Science

Co-director, Program in Law and Social Thought

Coordinator, Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Honors Program Advisor

Dr. Renée Heberle came to the University of Toledo in Fall of 1997 with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and BA in Theater from Brandeis University. Dr. Heberle is co-director of the Program in Law and Social Thought.  Her research and teaching interests turned to prisons and the politics of incarceration in 2010. She coordinates the Inside/Out Prison Exchange Project and activities related to prison education at the Toledo Correctional Institution in Toledo.

Dr. Heberle was a faculty expert presenting at the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar "Diverse Philosophical Approaches to Sexual Violence" at Elon University in 2017. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand in 2005. She spoke as a plenary panelist at as conference entitled: “’Against our Will’. Forty Years after: Exploring the Field of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict”, July 2015 in Hamburg / Germany.

Her fields of teaching and research within Political Science are political philosophy and contemporary critical and feminist theory. Courses include Principles of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Ideas; Sexual Politics; The Politics of Violence; the Inside/Out Prison Exchange: Law, Justice and Mass Incarceration; Race, Gender and Law; the Gateway to Law and Social Thought; the Capstone in LST: Prisons.

Dr. Heberle has published in a numbers of venues. Her first and most reprinted and cited essay appeared in 1996 in Hypatia: A Journal of Women and Philosophy. She has since published articles and review essays in Law, Politics and Society and Signs: a Journal of Women and Culture, The Law and Society Review, and Political Theory. Her edited volumes include Feminist Interpretations of Adorno, Imagining Law: Essays on Drucilla Cornell, and Theorizing Sexual Violence. She has published essays in the Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex and Crime and the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory.

Education:

  • Ph.D., University of Massachusetts - Amherst (1996)
  • B.A., with Honors (Theater), Brandeis University (1984)

Research Interests

  • Contemporary critical and feminist theory
  • State, civil and personal violence
  • Punishment and prisons 

Teaching Interests

  • Classical, Modern and Contemporary Political Theory
  • Feminist Politics and Theory
  • Sexual Politics
  • Politics of Violence
  • Punishment and theories of Citizenship
  • Law and Society

 

 

 

Last Updated: 8/7/23