Renee Heberle, Ph.D.
Program Director, Law and Social Thought
Professor, Political Science and Public Administration
SM 3008
419.530.4061
renee.heberle@utoledo.edu
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
