Laura Penny

BA (Vind), MA (UWO), PhD (SUNY Buffalo)

Laura Penny teaches in the Contemporary and Early Modern Studies Programs, and lectures in the Foundation Year. Her research and teaching interests include popular culture, mass media, digital culture, ethics, aesthetics, and satire. She is equally fond of spending an entire term on one thinker (Montaigne; Spinoza; Benjamin) and considering broad themes (feminisms; the media; the self) that allow us to read many thinkers.

Dr. Penny is the co-founder and co-director of Humanities for Young People, King’s summer program for secondary school students. She is also a volunteer for Halifax Humanities 101, which offers humanities education to those living on low incomes in HRM.

A member of the first graduating class in CSP, Dr. Penny continued her studies at Western University and SUNY Buffalo. She is the author of two books, Your Call is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit (2005) and More Money than Brains: Why School Sucks, College is Crap & Idiots Think They’re Right (2010). Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The Chronicle Herald and Globe and Mail to Theory and Event and Philosophy and Literature. She is working on a book of cultural commentary about current events—such as they are—called New Lows.

Recent Publications

• “Parables and Politics: How Benjamin and Deleuze read Kafka”, forthcoming, accepted by Theory & Event
• “Consumerism in a time of downturn: It’s beginning to look a lot like Keynes-mas”, The Globe Essay, in The Globe and Mail, December 2008
• “Junk, Inglorious Junk”, Food book omnibus Book Review, The Globe and Mail, December 2008
• “The Highest of All the Arts: Kant and Poetry”, in Philosophy and Literature, October 2008
• 50 Greatest Books: Lolita, Short Essay, The Globe and Mail, June 2008
• “Who could have oil and kindness enough for them?: A reading of Derrida’s Spurs and Nietzsche’s Women”, in Dalhousie French Studies, Spring 2008
• More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They’re Right. McClelland and Stewart Publishers, May 2010
• Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, released by McClelland and Stewart, Crown (U.S.), and Scribe (Australia) Publishers, May 2005
• “The Fool’s Dilemma”, CBC Radio One, Ideas.
• The National, “3 to Watch”
• CBC At the table