Amy Sullivan

Amy C. Sullivan teaches History of Childhood; Race, Gender & Medicine; Uses & Abuses: History of Drugs, Addiction and Recovery; U.S. Since 1945; History of U.S. Feminisms; and public/oral history theory and methods courses. Her book, Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss and Redemption in the Rehab State (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) centers the voices and experiences of family members, physicians, social workers, treatment specialists, and harm reduction advocates to examine how Minnesota, the state that invented “rehab,” dealt with the challenges and deaths related to the opioid epidemic. 

She is currently at work on a second book project about the legacy of trauma after the 1977 Girl Scout murders in Oklahoma. Using oral history interviews she conducted over thirty years, the project recasts the tragedy from the perspective of survivors, mostly girls and young women at the time, to explore the life-span of trauma on individuals and their communities for decades afterwards.

Dr. Sullivan works on local, state, and national oral history projects. Currently, these include the national Mellon-funded Federal Employees & Contractors Oral History Project with the Organization of American Historians and the local non-profit Green Card Voices on a project related to ICE/Operation Metro Surge. 

Some past project partners and funders include Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics, the National Library of Medicine, and The Bakken Museum. Before earning her PhD in 2013 (University of Illinois at Chicago), she taught for ten years in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and served as program director of the department’s Self-Sufficiency Program, a one-semester college prep course for low-income parents. 

You can learn more about her work at amycsullivan.net.