Karen Brooks

Karen is Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences and an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Southern Cross University where she lectures on media and popular culture using a psychoanalytical model. Her research is widely published in Australia and overseas. She’s also an award-winning teacher and travels regularly giving keynotes at various conferences and providing in-service training for educational professionals. Karen is also a columnist for The Courier Mail and appears fairly regularly on Channel 7’s Sunrise and The Morning Show. She’s also a member of ABC’s The Einstein Factor’s “Brains’ Trust”, and a frequent contributor on national, state and local radio.

Karen believes passionately in the power of education to mobilise positive change and feels it’s important that the research happening in universities is widely disseminated in accessible and meaningful ways.

A published creative writer, Karen’s has five novels to her name all of which received terrific reviews and her sixth, Tallow, published by Random House, will hit the stores in October, 2009 and is already being described as ‘quite breathtaking’. Set in a world akin to renaissance Venice, it is the first in a trilogy entitled The Curse of the Bond Riders. Karen’s non-fiction book: Consuming Innocence: Popular Culture and Our Children was published to critical acclaim by UQP in February 2008. This book deals with the sexualisation and corporatisation of childhood and the complex relationship kids, parents and all adults have with the culture they love to loathe.