Helen M. Kinsella

Guest Author

Helen M. Kinsella (@hkinsella6) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.  She also holds affiliate faculty positions in the 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. She was previously Associate Professor in 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 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.  She has 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.

She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “War Fatigue: On Not Being Able to Sleep,” as well as continuing research on political science and law scholar Francis Lieber and the laws of war. She is the author of The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press) which won the 2012 Sussex International Theory Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Joseph S. Lepgold Book Prize (Georgetown University). Her work has also appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, Feminist Review, among others. Generally, her research engages international humanitarian law; international norms and institutions; international security; gender and armed conflict; international relations theories; contemporary political thought and feminist theories.