Dorothy Dolan's (nee Porter) research interests are in the history of public health, social medicine and the formation of the nation state since the eighteenth century. She has also published on the history of the experience of health and illness by patients and healers in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. She is currently researching the ways patients manage Parkinson’s disease through creative expression, and recently published her collection of essays Health Citizenship, which examined how a new heuristic for understanding chronic diseases emerged with radical health activism that interrogated the complex interaction of biology with the political, economic, social, and cultural relations of the twenty and twenty-first centuries.