Helen Kinsella

Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I hold affiliate faculty positions in the  Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center at the Law School, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. As of June 2023, I am also a Visiting Scholar, at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Prior to joining UMN, I 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.

I held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the New York University School of Law, and postdoctoral and predoctoral appointments at Stanford University and Harvard University. In Spring 2023, I was the Fulbright U.S. Friends of Queen’s University Belfast Distinguished Scholar focusing on the gendered legacies of the use of tear gas, building on my  previous research on international humanitarian law and its gendered obligations, violations, and effects.

I have a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a BA in Political Science and Gender Studies from Bryn Mawr College.

My research focuses on the theorization of gender and armed conflict. I am currently working on a book on sleep in war and another on the histories of the laws of war through the United States' wars against Native peoples.  I am the author of The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011; paperback 2015), which won the 2012 Sussex International Theory Prize (The Centre for Advanced International Theory) and received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Joseph S. Lepgold Book Prize (Georgetown University). Her work has also appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review,  Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, Feminist Review, among others.