Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is an Irish Germanist and Founder of WiGS (Women in German Studies).
She founded Women in German Studies (WiGS), the network for female Germanists of which she was the first president.
She taught at the University of Reading until 1989, whereupon she was elected to the German fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford, a post from which she retired in 2013.
She then took up a post in the Faculty of Modern Languages as project leader on 'Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800' (2013-16).
[2] In 2016 she was a visiting professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and on 1 December of the same year she was conferred with an honorary DLitt by the National University of Ireland.