Helen Kennedy, MA

Helen Kennedy is a PhD candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa where she studies international intervention in the Bosnian War (1992-1995). She is specifically interested in the ways that military and humanitarian organizations defined the conflict and how those definitions resulted in differing frameworks for intervention. She is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow and was awarded a Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security Initiative Doctoral Award.

Helen holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Prince Edward Island and an MA from the University of Victoria. Her master’s was funded by the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and explored the social construction of psychological trauma in the context of the NATO bombing of Kosovo. Her current work picks up on larger ideas of understanding how our language affects our understanding of events and vice versa. 

Helen has been a teaching assistant in the Human Rights and History departments at Carleton University for three years. She has provided guest lectures on human rights, terrorism, and the (dis)order of the 1990s and has worked as a reviewer for The Arbutus Review (the University of Victoria undergraduate journal). She is currently a copyeditor for the journal Postcolonial Text and served two terms as president of the Carleton History Graduate Students Association. In another life, Helen worked in rural economic development where much of her work was involved with grant writing and promoting, building, and protecting outdoor spaces.