Kelleher was 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. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967 for a thesis entitled German nuclear dilemmas, 1955-1965. Her doctoral advisor at M.I.T. was William W. Kaufmann. Mount Holyoke later honored her with a D.Litt.[2][3]
Kelleher 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.[citation needed]
Kelleher founded the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.[4] She 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.[citation needed]
Kelleher was a member of several advisory boards, including the Arms Control Association,[5] the Geneva Centre for Security Policy,[6] SIPRI North America[4] and the Center for Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) in Geneva. She founded the now-international organization Women in International Security (WIIS).[4] She was Professor Emerita at the U.S. Naval War College.,[7] 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 (with particular responsibility for exchanges with the Russian, Chinese, and Indian academies) for two terms, was a two-term member of Naval Studies Board, and a member of several Academies" study panels.[citation needed] Kelleher was also a Distinguished Fellow of the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA).[citation needed]
Kelleher was 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.[8] Kelleher was celebrated for her excellence in scholarship and public service with the Joseph Kruzel[9] and Hubert Humphrey[10] 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 (EASI)[11] 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.[12]
Kelleher died on February 15, 2023, at the age of 84.[13]