About Kellen.

Dr. Kellen Heniford is a historian, researcher, writer, and educator.

She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with an award-winning thesis and a concentration in History and African American Studies. Kellen then went on to receive her MA, MPhil, and PhD from the History Department at Columbia University, where she also served as a Richard Hofstadter Fellow.

After earning her PhD, Kellen held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. She then moved to Everytown for Gun Safety, where she began to focus her research and writing on the Second Amendment and the history of firearms regulation.

Kellen is now a Visiting Scholar in History at Wesleyan University. She is continuing her own work on Second Amendment-related history while also joining Wesleyan’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society in a project to catalog and contextualize historical weapons laws. In a separate capacity, Kellen continues to lead a long-term effort with the National Park Service to re-work the presentation of Black history at First State National Historic Park in Delaware, which has been ongoing since 2023.

Her research and writing have been published in a variety of scholarly journals, law reviews, and other outlets, ranging from the Journal of the Early Republic to the Harvard Law and Policy Review to the Journal of the Civil War Era and beyond. Kellen has received funding or other support for her work from the Mellon Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers Consortium, Arnold Ventures, and the University of Buffalo School of Law, among others.

Outside her professional life, Kellen is an avid science fiction reader, an amateur poet, a park lover, a recreational swimmer, and a doting cat parent. She is particularly proud of the several years she spent involved in survivor advocacy and in organizing against sexual violence on college campuses. Kellen has been cited by a variety of media organizations—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR—on the importance of creating safe and inclusive learning environments.