Rate My Professor Rachel Kerr

Professor Rachel Kerr is Professor of War and Society in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. A contemporary historian with over two decades’ experience, 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. Prior to joining King’s in 2003, she worked in academic publishing for Polity Press and served as a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ottawa. Kerr is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society. She has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. She co-convenes the War Crimes Research Group and the Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network, a faculty-wide initiative with colleagues from Development Studies and Geography.

Kerr’s research focuses on how states, societies, and individuals contend with legacies of war and atrocity, encompassing transitional and post-conflict justice, memory, art and reconciliation, international law and war, war crimes, peace and justice, security, conflict, history, international relations, law, and gender and war. Her past work examined the law and politics of international judicial interventions, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s record in the Western Balkans, the Special Court in Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court’s examination of the UK’s handling of war crimes allegations in Iraq from 2003 to 2009. From 2016 to 2021, she led AHRC-funded projects under Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community, exploring arts-based approaches to reconciliation. She currently contributes to an ESRC-funded project on intersectional gendered violence, leading a strand on gendered violence in the context of war and genocide. Key publications include the edited books An Introduction to War Studies (Edward Elgar, 2023, with M. Goodman and M. Moran), Reconciliation After War: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2021, with H. Redwood and A.J.W. Gow), and Routledge Handbook of War, Law and Technology (Routledge, 2019, with J. Gow, E. Dijxhoorn, and G. Verdirame). Recent articles feature ‘Curating a “Living Museum”: Art and Justice Interactions at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2024), ‘Art, Truth, Reconciliation and Resistance: Reaching Out in Sierra Leone and Canada’ (2023), and ‘Genocide and the Limits of Transitional Justice’ (Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2022).