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Professor Rachel Kerr

Professor Rachel Kerr

  • Academics
  • Supervisors

Professor of War and Society

Deputy Head of the Department of War Studies and Director of Academic Staffing.

Research subject areas

  • Conflict
  • History
  • International relations
  • Law
  • Security

Contact details

Biography

Professor Rachel Kerr is a contemporary historian working on transitional and post-conflict justice and memory and international law and war. She co-convenes the War Crimes Research Group at King’s. She also co-convenes the SSPP Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network with Dr Jelke Boesten (Development Studies) and Professor Cathy McIlwaine (Geography).

Rachel joined King’s in 2003 as a Lecturer to develop the now long-standing War Studies Online programmes, having previously worked in academic publishing for Polity Press. She holds a BA in International History and Politics from the University of Leeds and an MA and PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.

In 2009-10, she was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and from 2011-13, a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada.

She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society.

 

Research

  • International law, politics and justice
  • War crimes
  • Transitional/post-conflict justice
  • Art and reconciliation

Rachel’s research focuses on war crimes, post-conflict justice and reconciliation and international law, politics and justice.

Together with James Gow, she leads a programme of research investigation creative and arts-based approaches to peacebuilding and reconciliation: Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community

 

Publications

Rachel's Pure page

 

Teaching

  • 7SSWM225 Conflict, Rights and Justice
  • 7SSWM186 International Law and the Use of Force
  • 6SSW3036 War and Genocide
  • 6SSW3037 Contending with Legacies of Atrocity

Professor Kerr currently supervises PhD students working on the following topics:

  • UK war crimes trials in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • Justice and reintegration in post-conflict Central African Republic
  • Anglo-American Diplomacy, Human Rights and the Slave Trade
  • Contending with reconciliation and legacies of atrocity in Nigeria
  • Post-conflict education and transitional justice in Sri Lanka

 

Research centres

  • War Crimes Research Group
  • Arts and Conflict Hub
  • Conflict Records Unit
  • Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network