Accessibility statement

Dr Ruth Kelly
Lecturer

Biography

Ruth Kelly is a lecturer in human rights, based in Politics and the Centre for Applied Human Rights. She convenes the Human Rights Workshop – an interdisciplinary space for thinking creatively, critically and politically about rights – and is a member of the advisory board of York’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Centre. She is currently Dean of Postgraduate Taught Students in the Department of Politics and International Relations. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Elect Her - a multi-partisan organisation working to motivate, support and equip women in all their diversity to stand for political office in Britain. 

Ruth’s research is on cultural politics, citizenship practices and political theory. Since 2016 she has been working with artists and activists from Bangladesh and Uganda to explore the links between storytelling and the arts, activism, and the political imagination. This has included work on the ethics of North-South research collaborations, in the context of epistemic injustice and colonial legacies. During that time she has also supported programmes of peer-learning for human rights leaders and activists at risk, and research on sustaining activism over time.

Before taking up her post at York, Ruth held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford, supporting the Symposium on Strength and Solidarity for Human Rights. She has also held a fellowship at Yale University and a lectureship in Politics at the University of Durham. She has a background in law and politics, with a PhD in Politics from York, an LLM from Cambridge and an LLB from Trinity College, Dublin.

She has previously served as Chair of the Electoral Reform Society, and worked with ActionAid, Oxfam, UNDP and the European Commission.

Contact details

Dr Ruth Kelly
Centre for Applied Human Rights
University of York
YORK
YO10 5DD

ruth.kelly@york.ac.uk