Megan O’Donnell, Associate Communications Officer

Megan O’Donnell knows that the humanities are better together. And she believes that building community begins with communication. These principles guide her work as the Associate Communications Officer for the Whitney Humanities Center. In this role, Megan does more than polish prose and craft compelling content. She imagines new ways to amplify the voices of Yale faculty and students across the humanities and brings these voices into conversation with one another through the Whitney’s print, digital, and social media communications.

Prior to joining Yale in 2022, Megan enjoyed collaborating with faculty, students, and administrators to support humanities research and teaching at the University of Delaware (UD). While there, she served as the English department’s communication assistant and taught digital rhetoric and writing. Currently, Megan is finishing her doctoral dissertation, “Imagining Ecology through British Speculative Fiction and Science, 1818-1898,” for which she was awarded a UD Doctoral Fellowship. “Imagining Ecology” analyzes depictions of ecology and the environment in nineteenth-century British fiction, from novels like Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland to popular science writing. Her work in the environmental and public humanities has also received generous support from the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, Delaware Public Humanities Initiative, and UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies.

Here at Yale, Megan will draw on her expertise as an interdisciplinary scholar and strategic storyteller to engage an audience of humanities faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Her goal is simple: to forward the Whitney’s mission of cultivating a broad-based intellectual community of humanities scholars—one which transcends the bounds of academic department and rank.