ROBIN JENSEN

Robin E. Jensen is Professor in the Department of Communication, and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities, at the University of Utah. She studies historical and contemporary discourses concerning health, science, sex, and gender. Much of her research focuses on the rhetoric of reproductive health as it plays out in the contexts of public sex education, (in)fertility, HIV/AIDS, and adolescent pregnancy. Her new book, Productive Forces: The Untold Story of How Women Doctors Changed Gynecology during the Twentieth Century, will be published in 2027 with New York University Press in the Health, Society and Inequality series. In that book and in other recent projects, she has been exploring how appeals to chemical rhetoric are central to arguments surrounding significant social issues such as contraception access, sterilization abuse, and gynecological cancer screenings.

She is also 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). Infertility was awarded the Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association (NCA) and the Outstanding Book Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG). Dr. Jensen is also the recipient of NCA's Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award and the New Investigator Award from NCA's Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship.

Currently, she teaches courses in strategic communication, advertising, and health and science communication. Dr. Jensen is series editor for the Johns Hopkins University Press book series in Health Communication.