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. 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. A Marxist humanist, Sheehan has written critically of Lysenkoism and Stalin's impact on scientific development, while stressing the necessity of understanding such trends in full socio-historical context.