Amy Sullivan

Amy C. Sullivan teaches courses related to women, children, drugs/addiction and the history of medicine. 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, 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 taught in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse from 2002-2011 and served as program director of the department’s Self-Sufficiency Program, a one-semester college prep course for low-income parents. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013.