Kristy Kelly (University of Wisconsin – Madison, PhD) is a sociologist specializing in gender and development, policy and politics, transnational feminisms, gender mainstreaming, and social transformation. She uses gender and education as critical lenses to examine social change in Southeast Asia, primarily in Vietnam. She is currently assistant professor of global and international education at Drexel University where she teaches courses on gender and education, education diplomacy, the political economy of education reform, and qualitative research methods. She is simultaneously affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, where she served as Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Southeast Asian Studies (2010-2012).

Dr. Kelly is completing a book titled Whatever Happened to Comrade? The Politics of Gender and Development in Vietnam, which is a multi-year ethnography of Vietnamese feminist engagement with gender and development discourses, policies and practices, and with the state, development institutions and each other in post-socialist Vietnam. Her book illuminates training as a key feminist space, place and process for transforming social relations and development practice. Dr. Kelly has also published on higher education in Vietnam; gender, land and corruption in Africa; women and educational leadership; feminist pedagogies and online learning; transnational feminisms; and the politics of gender, class and citizenship in Asia.

Dr. Kelly received her MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and her BA from Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Academia, Dr. Kelly worked for a variety of development organizations, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Hong Kong, the Center for Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement (CSEARR) in San Francisco, and Volunteers in Asia (VIA) in Vietnam. She established the first Vietnam office of the Institute of International Education (IIE) in Hanoi, where she lived from 1992 to 2000. She continues to consult and advise on gender, education and development issues for multilateral and humanitarian aid organizations in Asia and Africa. Dr. Kelly serves as an Expert Advisor on Training for Gender Equality and Gender Mainstreaming to the United Nations, and is a Fulbright Core Specialist on Gender Equality.