Dr. Sara Black is a historian of medicine in modern France. Her first book, Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long-Nineteenth Century (2022) examines how through self-experimentation and pharmaceutical industrialization psychotropic drugs like opium, morphine, and chloroform, became such ubiquitous commodities in French medical practice for relieving pain.

As Assistant Professor of History at Christopher Newport University, she teaches courses on medical history, French history, global history, and the history of gender and sexuality. Her research interests include urban history, hygiene and public health, gender and sexuality, and criminality.

In addition to her research on the history of drugs, her next book project explores the history of transnational public health campaigns against tuberculosis during and after the First World War.