I am Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
I am the author of the Lammy nominated and award winning book, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
I am currently the Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation funded project Habitable Worlds: A Disability, Ethics, and AI Think Tank. I also direct the Viral Imaginaries Lab at Loyola Marymount University (LMU).
Currently, I am at work on a book length project on the cultural history of herpes.
Before arriving at LMU, I spent a number of years working in LGBT and feminist public health, including at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, at Fenway Community Health, and in the former Department of Social and Behavioral Health at Boston University School of Public Health where I worked with the Women’s Wellbeing Studies in the early years of The Fenway Institute. I received my PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, my Masters in Social Work from Boston University, and my BA in Religious Studies with a concentration in Women’s Studies from the College of the Holy Cross.
My research is informed by and grows out of my dual training as both a social and behavioral health researcher (MSW in Macro Social Work with an emphasis on community health) and my doctoral training in cultural studies, specifically gender and sexuality studies. I siutuate my work squarely within feminist and queer cultural studies as well as the emerging sub-field of critical health studies. Broadly speaking, in my research I ask the question: How did HIV change X? My first book began with the question How did HIV change lesbian politics? My next book asks how HIV changed sexual public health.
Mairead Sullivan, MSW, PhD 