Participant Info
- First Name
- Kelly
- Last Name
- O'Donnell
- Country
- United States
- State
- CT Connecticut
- kelly.odonnell@yale.edu
- Affiliation
- Yale University
- Website URL
- http://www.kellysodonnell.com
- Keywords
- history of medicine, women's history, U.S. history, health activism, women's health, gender and medicine, birth control
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I specialize in the history of medicine and the history of women and gender in the modern United States. I have written on topics such as contraception, abortion, and women’s health activism.
I am currently a Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. After receiving my PhD, I spent a year working on the ground in a women’s health advocacy organization. I also taught in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Thomas Jefferson University. In 2020-21, I was the NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
At the moment I am working on two book projects. The first, The Pill Hearings: Science, Politics, and Birth Control, is a microhistory of the 1970 Senate subcommittee hearings on the safety of oral contraceptives, and the heated debates and feminist protests occurring during them. The second, Hippocratic Vows: How the Doctor’s Wife Transformed American Medicine, will rewrite the history of health care in the U.S. from the perspective of physicians’ spouses, who not only supported the profession, but helped shape it.
- Recent Publications
- “The Activist Archive: Feminism, Personal-Political Papers, and Recent Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History vol. 32, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 88-109.
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“The Case Against the Doctors: Gender, Authority, and Critical Science Writing in the 1960s,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences vol. 75, no. 4 (October 2020): 429-447.
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(With Stephen T. Casper) “The Punch-Drunk Boxer and the Battered Wife: Gender and Brain Injury Research,” Social Science & Medicine vol. 245 (January 2020): 112688.
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“Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine vol. 93, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 550-576.
- “Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 77-96.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- KellyODonn
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Gender, Medicine, Politics, Science, Sexuality, Technology, Women