Political Science and Public Administration

Faculty & Staff

Dr. Renée Heberle Director, MA Program Honors Program Advisor Professor

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. She is also interim director of the School for Interdisciplinary Studies. 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. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand and has been invited 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.

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