Robin E. Jensen is Professor of Communication at the University of Utah. She studies historical and contemporary discourses concerning health, science, sex, and gender. Much of her research, to date, focuses on the rhetoric of reproductive health as it plays out in the contexts of public sex education, (in)fertility, HIV/AIDS, adolescent pregnancy, and gynecology. Her current book project, Productive: How Women in Medicine Changed Gynecology during the Twentieth Century, is under contract 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 the author of Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term (2016; The Penn State University Press), which was awarded the 2017 Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association (NCA) and the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG); and Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924 (2010; University of Illinois Press), which won the 2015 Health Communication Distinguished Book Award from NCA. Dr. Jensen is also the recipient of a 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, a 2019 NEH Summer Stipend, NCA’s 2015 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award, and the 2015 New Investigator Award from NCA’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division.
Professor Jensen is Series Editor for Johns Hopkins University Press’s book series in Health Communication.
She can be seen along with other faculty in the Department of Communication’s rhetoric area performing in this video promoting the graduate program.