Academic Background

Dr. Penelope Ironstone is an interdisciplinary scholar with degrees in Directed Interdisciplinary Studies (B.A. Hons., Carleton University, 1991), Comparative Literary Studies (M.A., Carleton University, 1993), and Social & Political Thought (Ph.D., York University, 2001). Her central pedagogical and research interests concern the mechanisms deployed to resist difficult information – be it information regarding social difference or information concerning health and illness – and the social and political consequences of these resistances. Her current research project, "From Seasonal Flu to Pandemic Influenza: The Cultural Life of a Virus," is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Ironstone-Catterall is an Editorial Board Member for Space & Culture: An International Journal of Social Spaces, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Communication. She was appointed English-Language Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of Communication in 2010. Her interests and supervisory interests include health, medicine, and risk communication, risk, media, and the politics of anxiety, public understandings of science, queer theory and cultural production, cultural theory and cultural studies, and governmentality.

Link to website:
http://www.penelopeironstone.com/