On Thursday 1 December 2016, Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly was conferred with an Honorary DLitt by the National University of Ireland in Dublin. She is an alumna of the NUI, having studied German and Spanish at University College Cork for her BA and German for her MA, before taking the degree of Dr. Phil at the University of Basel. She is the author of four monographs and the editor of a further eight books and has published some 80 articles and book chapters. She came to Oxford in 1989 as Faculty Lecturer in German and Fellow of Exeter College. In 1994 she was given the title of Professor of German Literature.
She is best known for her work on early modern court culture and court festivals, for instance, Triumphal Shews. Tournaments at German-Speaking Courts in their European Context 1560-1730 (1992) and Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (2002), Spectaculum Europaeum. Theatre and Spectacle in Europe, (1580-1750) with Pierre Béhar (1999) and Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe with J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (2004). Her most recent book is Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010). In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the leader of the HERA-funded project ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800’ (www.marryingcultures.eu).