Kelleher is a graduate of the Girls’ Latin School in Boston, and received her A.B. and D.Litt. from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mount Holyoke later honored her with a D.Litt. She has taught at academic institutions including Columbia University, Barnard College, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Denver, and was a visiting fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University. She was a Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Kelleher founded the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. She has also assisted at various times the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation in the development and assessment of their grant programs in international security, and their efforts to change the traditional research agenda for students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, in the United States and throughout the world. She spearheaded these efforts as Chair of the Social Science Research Council's prestigious MacArthur Committee on International Peace and Security fellowships. She is a member of several advisory boards, including the Arms Control Association, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, SIPRI North America and the Center for Democratic Control of Armed Forces in Geneva. She founded the now-international organization Women in International Security. She is Professor Emerita at the U.S. Naval War College., where she served in several capacities, including editor of the Naval War College Review from Spring 2003 through June 2004. She was Vice-Chair of the Committee of International Security of the National Academies of Sciences for two terms, is now a two-term member of Naval Studies Board, and a member of several Academies" study panels. Kelleher is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Center for Naval Analyses. She has been decorated for her public service by both the American and German governments. Her German awards include the Gold Cross of Honor of the Bundeswehr and the Manfred Woerner award for "contributions to European security". Her American awards include the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and the Director's Medal from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kelleher has recently been celebrated for her excellence in scholarship and public service with the Joseph Kruzel and Hubert Humphrey awards from the American Political Science Association. She was one of the few academics asked in 2010 to join the Carnegie Commission's European American Security Initiative and was a member of the much-lauded working group on cooperative solutions to missile defense, which Ambassador Steven Pifer called "the most detailed Track II discussion of NATO-Russia missile defense cooperation" in a report for the Brookings Institution. Kelleher is the author of more than 70 publications focused principally on European security, with special interests in Germany and Russia beyond the United States. Her book on The Politics of German Nuclear Weapons is still considered a classic source. Kelleher’s most recent book is Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disarmament, co-edited with Judith Reppy of Cornell University. Lawrence Freedman, writing in Foreign Affairs, wrote that the “impressive group of scholars” contributing to the book move the debate on nuclear disarmament “to a more serious level.” According to American physicist Richard Garwin: "This valuable book extends the important conversation on getting to zero nuclear weapons by asking hard questions about how to accommodate the desires and preferences of the global community while making progress toward that goal."
