Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly FBA

HELEN WATANABE-O'KELLY studied German and Spanish at University College Cork, where she took her BA and MA. She did her PhD in German at the University of Basel. She first came to the UK in 1974 as Lecturer in German at the University of Reading and, in 1989, was made Lecturer in German at Oxford University and in 1994 Professor of German Literature. Her main research interests are early modern European court culture, early modern and nineteenth-century German literature, the representation of women and writing by women in German. With colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden, she is currently leading a research project funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area): Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800 (www.marryingcultures.eu).