Dr. Lusk

Dr. Penelope Lusk is a health professions educator whose research spans the philosophy of education, narrative medicine and the health humanities, and the ethics of medicine. Her work contributes to philosophical and narrative approaches in medical education by foregrounding the emotional, ethical, and relational dynamics that are often neglected in traditional health professions education paradigms.

Dr. Lusk holds a PhD in Education from the University of Pennsylvania and a MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her scholarship explores how shame operates within medical training as both a social and embodied experience that can shape learner identity, communication, and professional socialization. Her papers on shame, education, and identity, and medicine can be found in interdisciplinary journals including Evaluation and Clinical Practice, Hypatia, Literature and Medicine, Medical Teacher, and Teaching and Learning in Medicine. Dr. Lusk is currently working on a book project examining how shame influences teaching and learning about the body in medicine. Dr. Lusk is dedicated to public scholarship and to international collaboration and has collaborated with scholars across the UK. She is a prior Fellow at the University of California Center for Free Speech and Civic Education, was the 2024-2025 Queen Elizabeth Scholar at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and currently collaborates on a series of quarterly conversations bringing to light the impact of shame in medicine.

Outside of work, she is an avid knitter and bread baker.