Laura Penny

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

Dr. Laura Penny was a member of the first graduating class in Contemporary Studies. She has served as a teaching fellow, senior fellow and assistant professor in the Foundation Year, Contemporary Studies and Early Modern Studies Programmes at King’s.  Her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Chronicle Herald, International Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature and Theory and Event. She is the author of  Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit (2005) and More Money than Brains: Why School Sucks, College is Crap and Idiots Think They’re Right(2010), both of which made the Globe and Mail‘s 100 Books of the Year list. She has recently written an episode of CBC Radio’s Ideas about the ways we flatter and fool ourselves, and has appeared on The National’s “3 to Watch” political panel.

Books

• 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

Radio

• “The Fool’s Dilemma”, CBC Radio One, Ideas.

Television

• The National, “3 to Watch”
• CBC At the table

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