Helal Khan
Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral Fellow
Helal Mohammed Khan, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at the Center for Social Concerns. As an anthropologist invested in peace and justice, Helal is keen on expanding the center’s outreach into the local communities next to Notre Dame. He is also designing and will teach a spring semester course drawing on his doctoral research with Rohingya refugee communities in the Midwest and previous research with immigrant communities in Europe and the UK. At the center, Helal brings the expertise of peace he attained while serving as a UN peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and of strategy and management from his service with the Bangladesh Army and Border Guards, where he was a Major and a Deputy Director, respectively.
Helal has held a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, a Chevening Scholarship at the University of Edinburgh, and a Flanders Master Mind Scholarship at the University of Leuven. He is a graduate of Bangladesh’s Defence Services Command & Staff College and holds a postgraduate diploma in international relations from the University of Dhaka. Helal’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, Bangladesh Army Journal, Politikon: IAPSS Journal of Political Science, and The Jahangirnagar Review, among other outlets. He contributed a chapter to Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion (2016), edited at the Australian National University, and authored a Bengali poem collection, Ridoyer Rajpothe (2012). Helal is working on his dissertation book project, titled “The Abling Refugee and Regimes of Cooperation: The Burmese Rohingya in the American Midwest.”