Helen Kinsella

Queen’s University Belfast, U.S. Friends of Queen's University Belfast Distinguished Scholar Award

Professor Kinsella is an Associate Professor of Political Science & Law, Affiliate Faculty of Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. Her research focuses on the theorization of gender, armed violence and international humanitarian law. She is currently working on two books: one on sleep in war and another on settler empire and the laws of war. She is the author of the award winning The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her work has also appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, Feminist Review, among others. 

Prior to joining UMN, she was an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and an affiliate in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from 2005 to 2018. She has also held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York University School of Law, as well as postdoctoral and predoctoral appointments at Stanford University, and Harvard University.