Helena Sheehan is an academic philosopher, historian of science, philosophy, culture and politics. Sheehan is professor emeritus at Dublin City University, where she taught media studies and history of ideas in the School of Communications. She was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town on several occasions. She has been active on the left since the 1960s. She has given many conference papers and public lectures in universities and other bodies in USA, USSR, GDR, Mexico, Canada, Ireland, UK, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece and South Africa.

Biography

Born in the United States in 1944, Sheehan describes her childhood as Catholic and conservative, She began her university studies and taught primary school as a nun. She left the convent in 1965 and became an agnostic and liberal, then an atheist and radical. Sheehan graduated with a BS in 1967 from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, followed by an MA in 1970 from Temple University in Philadelphia. She earned a PhD in 1980 from Trinity College (Dublin) in philosophy. She became active on the new left in the US in the 1960s. In Ireland, she joined Sinn Féin (Official) in 1972 and then the Communist Party of Ireland in 1975. She chaired the Trinity College Dublin Communist Society. She joined the Labour Party in 1981, where she was a founder of Labour Left. Since 2011, she has belonged to no party, but has remained active on the left. She organised Occupy University during Occupy Dame Street in 2011. She travelled often to Greece and became involved with Syriza, writing about this in The Syriza Wave published in 2017. An autobiographical work entitled Navigating the Zeitgeist was published in 2019 with a sequel Until We Fall published in 2023. As a philosopher and historian of science, Sheehan writes from a Marxist perspective. She argues that Marx and Engels shared fundamentally the same view on the philosophy of science and written critically of Lysenkoism and Stalin's impact on scientific development, while stressing the necessity of understanding such trends in full socio-historical context. She is a strong critic of both positivism and postmodernism. Sheehan has lectured at the Humanist Association of Ireland. In her personal life, Sheehan was the partner of the trade unionist Sam Nolan.

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