Helen Watanabe O'Kelly

Biography

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is the Fellow and Tutor in German at Exeter College, Oxford, and Professor of German Literature at Oxford University. She specialises in the early modern period, and is a distinguished scholar in this field, and in the field of German literature as a whole. She works in particular on European court culture in the early modern period and on German literature written by women or representing women; from 2005 to 2008 she co-directed the AHRC major research project at Oxford University entitled 'The Representation of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media, 1500–present'. She founded Women in German Studies (WiGS), the network for female Germanists of which she was the first president.

She took her BA and MA at the National University of Ireland, [University College Cork], and her doctorate at the University of Basel. She taught at the University of Reading until 1989, whereupon she was appointed to the German fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford, a post from which she retired in 2013. She then took up a post in the Faculty of Modern Languages as Project Leader on 'Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800'. This is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). In 2007 she was the Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. She was proposed for AcademiaNet by the DFG German Research Foundation.

Her father was Professor Michael J. O'Kelly, Professor of Archaeology at University College, Cork, who discovered the midwinter illumination of Newgrange in 1967.