Olivia Campbell Books in Order

Olivia Campbell was born in Virginia, and she started writing early, making up mysteries inspired by the Nancy Drew books she loved. As a teenager, though, her biggest goal was ballet. She trained with hopes of becoming a professional dancer.

Then she broke her foot. The injury changed her plans and steered her toward arts journalism, a field where she could stay close to culture while building a life as a writer.

College brought another shift. An unplanned pregnancy, a difficult birth, and postpartum depression made medicine feel personal in a new way. Campbell began moving her reporting away from the arts and toward questions about health, women, history, and the systems that shape people’s lives.

She earned a journalism degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and later completed a master’s degree in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Her articles and essays have appeared in major newspapers, magazines, and science publications. She has also worked as a contributor focused on the science behind folklore, which fits her interest in the unexpected overlap between culture, history, and research.

Campbell’s first book, Women in White Coats, follows Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake, three nineteenth-century women who pushed into medicine when universities, licensing bodies, and hospitals were built to keep them out. The book looks at the practical barriers they faced, but it also stays with their friendships, disagreements, families, and ambitions.

The stakes were never only professional.

In Sisters in Science, Campbell turns to four women physicists, Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen. They were working in Germany as the Nazi regime made their academic lives, and in some cases their survival, impossible. Campbell traces their efforts to escape, rebuild careers abroad, and continue scientific work in a world that often treated women scientists as exceptions.

Her books are group biographies, but they don’t flatten their subjects into symbols. Campbell is interested in the day-to-day work behind big changes: studying where one is not welcome, finding mentors, raising money, getting a job, leaving home, and deciding when to keep pushing. Readers who like history with a clear human thread will find plenty to hold on to.

She writes about people who had to make room for themselves before they could make a difference.

Campbell now lives outside Philadelphia with her husband, sons, and cats. Her work continues to circle back to the same big questions: whose stories get remembered, who gets left out of the record, and what changes when we look again.