Mairead Sullivan, Ph.D.

My research interests reflect my multidisciplinary work in the fields of social and behavioral health sciences and humanities based gender and sexuality studies. My work is situated across the fields of feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and critical health studies. I am particularly interested in understanding the traffic between on the ground health and social movements and critical theory.

My current research is motivated by my experience as a Public Health researcher in the traditional social sciences. As a researcher in the field of social and behavioral health for lesbian and bisexual women after breast cancer, I found that the hard social sciences left little room to explore the meaning of the overlapping experiences of gender, sexuality, and illness. My current work bridges a traditionally empirical approach to the questions of the study of health with a humanistic concern with how we make meaning out of health, death, and identity.