Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly

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 took her BA and MA at the National University of Ireland, 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 she still holds. In 2007 she was the Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois.

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