Sarah O’Dell, MD, PhD, is a literary scholar and resident psychiatrist at the University of California, Irvine. 

As a physician-scholar, she is passionate about what the past can teach us about healing the mind.

Her research explores the relationship between early psychiatric practice, literature, and the history of religion. In rediscovering the healing imagination in eighteenth-century medicine and the early Gothic novel, she tells a new history of psychiatry.

She is also an expert on Inkling and physician Robert E. Havard (1901-1985), who provides the focus of her current book project, The Medical Inkling (currently under contract at Kent State UP).

She is the first to complete a humanities PhD within UC Irvine’s dual-degree MD/PhD program (MSTP). She completed her PhD in English, with an emphasis in Medical Humanities as well as specializations in Medieval, 18th c., and 19th c. British literature.

Her research has previously appeared in Mythlore, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. 

In her free time, she’s usually crafting, sewing, or creating new worlds in 1:12 miniature scale.