Kelly O’Donnell

Biography

Kelly O’Donnell joined the History Department in 2025. She is a historian of medicine, women and modern America with special interests in the history of reproductive health, science and medicine in popular culture and health advocacy.

Her first book, The Pill Hearings (under contract with Rutgers University Press), examines how concerns over the birth control pill’s side effects reshaped debates about reproductive health, pharmaceutical regulation and scientific and medical authority in the 1960s and 1970s. She is also developing a second book that rewrites the history of American health care from the perspective of doctors’ wives.

Before coming to Towson, Dr. O’Donnell taught at Bryn Mawr College, Yale University and Thomas Jefferson University. She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She received her Ph.D. from the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University in 2015. Her work has appeared in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Women’s History, Signs, Social Science & Medicine and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor for History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals.

Selected Publications

• “The Case Against the Doctors: Gender, Authority and Critical Science Writing in the 1960s,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 75, no. 4 (October 2020): 429-447.
• (with Stephen T. Casper) “The Punch-Drunk Boxer and the Battered Wife: Gender and Brain Injury Research,” Social Science & Medicine 245 (January 2020): 112688.
• “Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 93, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 550-576.
• “Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 77-96.

Recent Lectures and Presentations

2024

“Prescribing Reproductive Rights: Pills and the Politics of Family Planning, 1960-2024,” Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

 “Prescribing Reproductive Rights: Pills, Paternalism, and Patient Autonomy, 1969-2024,” Spring 2024 Colloquium, Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

2023

“Mrs. Medicine: Doctors’ Wives and the Making of Modern American Health Care,” Seventh Annual Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD

2022

“Hippocratic Vows: The Doctor’s Wife and the History of American Medicine,” Beaumont Medical Club, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT

“The Case Against the Pill?: Science Journalism and The Controversy Over Birth Control Side Effects, 1965-1975,” Percy Skuy Lecture on the History of Contraception, Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

Recent Book Reviews

Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America by Kathleen M. Crowther, Journal of Medical Regulation (forthcoming).

Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement by Judith A. Houck, British Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming).

Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation by Alison Lefkovitz, Journal of Family History vol. 46, no. 1 (January 2021): 107-109.

Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra L. Vostral, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 295-298.

Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence by Jacqueline H. Wolf, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences vol. 75, no. 1 (January 2020): 123-124.

Awards and Honors

• Stanley Jackson Prize (best article published in the journal in the preceding three years) for “The Case Against the Doctors,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2022)
• NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (2020-21)
• MHS-NEH Long-Term Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society (2020)
• Nancy Halverson Schless Short-Term Fellowship, American Philosophical Society (2019)
• History of Medicine Collections Travel Grant, Rubenstein Library, Duke University (2019)
• Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine, National Library of Medicine (2019)
• M. Louise Carpenter Gloeckner, M.D. Summer Research Fellowship, the Legacy Center at Drexel University College of Medicine (2018)
• Finalist, Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, for “Reproducing Jane,” Signs (2017)