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 Editor-in-Chief of 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.