Research Summary
Robin E. Jensen studies historical and contemporary discourses about health and science, focusing specifically on questions dealing with sexual and reproductive health, sex and gender equity, and rhetorical history. She leads the Chemical Rhetoric Group, works with the ASCENT Center for Reproductive Health, and is currently writing a book entitled, _Productive: How Women in Medicine Changed Gynecology in the Twentieth Century_.
Education
- B.A., Communication; Philosophy, Concorida College, Moorhead, MN
- M.A., Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Ph.D., Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Biography
Robin E. Jensen (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. She studies historical and contemporary discourses concerning health, science, sex, and gender. Her research explores the rhetoric of reproductive health as it plays out in the contexts of public sex education, (in)fertility, HIV/AIDS, adolescent pregnancy, and gynecological and reproductive medicine. She is the author of Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term (2016; The Penn State University Press) and Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924 (2010; University of Illinois Press). Dr. Jensen is the recipient of NCA's Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award and the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend Grant and an NEH Faculty Fellowship. She is currently working in affiliation with the ASCENT Center for Reproductive Health at the University of Utah and on a book project about the history of modern gynecology entitled, Productive: How Women in Medicine Changed Gynecology in the Twentieth Century.