Megan O’Donnell

Megan O’Donnell knows that the humanities are better together, and she believes that building community begins with communication. That conviction shapes her work as the inaugural communications officer for the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), where she has developed the center’s voice and communications vision from the ground up.

In this role, Megan oversees a comprehensive communications strategy that engages faculty, graduate students, staff, donors, and public audiences. She stewards the WHC’s brand identity, supervises student writers and photographers, creates and manages content across platforms, and advises WHC leadership on long-term communications planning.

Megan’s approach to this work is grounded in the insight that “communication” and “community” share the same root—communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all.” Her goal is to create common ground and bring people together in shared understanding across the humanities. Sometimes that means translating complex academic ideas into clear, compelling content for diverse audiences; other times it means nurturing new partnerships or working alongside leadership to shape strategy and institutional vision.

Her commitment to building community is also reflected in her leadership work with the WHC’s graduate fellowships. As co-leader of the WHC Graduate Fellows in the Environmental Humanities, she helps design programming and foster intellectual community for graduate students pursuing interdisciplinary work in the field. She also directs the WHC Graduate Professional Experience Fellowship, a program focused on graduate training in communications and humanities-centered storytelling.

Megan holds a Ph.D. (2022) in English from the University of Delaware and a B.A. (2014) in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Her dissertation, “Imagining Ecology: Species/Energy/Dimension in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction,” explores the degree to which British speculative fiction cut across nineteenth-century domains of knowledge—from biology and ecology to mathematics and physics—in ways that invite ecological perspectives. Weaving together close readings of fiction such as Frankenstein (1818), Flatland (1884), and Victorian fairy stories with analyses of scientific textbooks and thought experiments, her dissertation shows how examining British speculative fiction and science through one another can generate new ecocritical insights on well-worn and understudied texts alike.