Helena Meyer-Knapp

Member of the Faculty- The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA USA

Helena Meyer-Knapp

Bio/CV

 

Helena Meyer-Knapp has had a long career as professor equally  committed to research and  teaching. She also has extensive experience encouraging citizens and policy makers to get involved in work for peace locally and nationally. She earned a BA in History at Oxford in the UK, the country of her birth, and an MA in Communications and a PhD in Political Studies in her adopted country, the USA.

An expert on war and peace-making in the modern era, in 2003 she published her first book, Dangerous Peace-Making. It centered on case studies of the risks and opportunities in peace efforts  in the 1990s in a variety of countries. It concluded with reflections post war justice and reconciliation.

Until recently her research centered on conflict and reconciliation in NE Asia with a special focus on Japan and South Korea. She presented regularly at academic conferences. One element, a study of Japanese student attitudes to South Korean consumer culture, was published in the Japan Social Innovation Journal (2013). The public discussion work is most easily accessible, via essays and conference presentations on this website.

Helena was appointed Member of the Faculty at the Evergreen State College  in 1984,  teaching undergraduates about international relations, ethics and political studies. She also offered graduate courses on conflict and management in Evergreen’s Masters in Public Administration program. She has been honored with a Bunting Fellowship (at Harvard), a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship (at Kyung Hee Graduate School of Peace Studies in Korea) and the HORN fellowship (at Hyogo Prefectural University in Japan).

Helena traveled often for her work, especially to NE Asia. She lived in Olympia WA for 46 years where she combined tending her own garden with support for  Garden Raised Bounty – food and farming for low income families in South Puget Sound Sound. She has a chapter on gardens in the US, the UK, Japan and Korea as one path to understanding global citizenship, in Wang, Xiao-Lei (王晓蕾) ed. People without Borders: Becoming Members of Global Communities. (2014)

UPDATE 2021 — this website is largely dormant these days.

Helena brought her teaching at Evergreen to an end at the end of 2017. Roughly two years later she had left Olympia as well, and 2020 found her living in Berkeley, CA.

Since 2016 she has been writing and publishing pamphlets. A combination of pictures and essays, they both draw on her scholarly work and also offer rumination on contemporary political and social issues. The first series, a response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump, appeared under the name The World Turned Upside Down. The second series, beginning in 2020 is titled Remember, Repair, Reunite.

These pamphlets and her current work (since 2017) is available on Helena’s other professional website: peacemakerpress.com

 

Meyer-Knapp CV 2018

Contact info

phone: (001) 360 643 0900

Helena.Meyer_Knapp@evergreen.edu