Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California-Santa Barbara

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and founding director and past co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center for media research at UC Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, the world's leading feminist media journal.

Dr. Penley is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten books and has taught and lectured on her research around the world. Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis; NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America; Male Trouble; Technoculture; The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender, and The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, (trans. German and Spanish) with Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young.

A book in progress, Teaching Pornography, is based on the pioneering course on pornography Dr. Penley developed at UCSB over 25 years ago. The class has three tracks: a history of moving image pornographies, a survey of methods for studying pornographies, and an intense look at the adult industry through guest lectures by its experts and practitioners. She is proud to have been featured in Rolling Stone as one of the "most dangerous professors in America" and to have her porn class denounced by the Rev. Pat Robertson as a "new low in humanist excess." He went on to exclaim that “A feminist teaching pornography? That’s like Scopes teaching evolution!”

Dr. Penley's research and teaching on pornography led to the development of porn studies as an interdisciplinary academic discipline. She serves on the Editorial Board of the international journal Porn Studies and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Adult Industry Scholarly Interest Group, with over 150 professors and graduate students.

In her spare time, she is President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an independent faculty advocacy organization serving all ten UC campuses on economic and employment conditions, academic freedom, and shared governance. It gathers and disseminates information on issues before California government's legislative and executive branches, other relevant state units dealing with higher education, the University administration, and the Board of Regents.