Research

For the most up-to-date information, see my Curriculum Vitae.

What I do:

My scholarly interests begin at digital rhetoric and composition studies, often with an orientation toward social web activism and to new media’s ability to unlock the creative potential of 21-century composers.  I work within the disciplines of composition and rhetoric and communication studies, typically incorporating civics, ethics, media study and critical theory into my research and pedagogy.

I approach Teaching as a research project, and actively create avenues in which my scholarly inquiries and my classrooms converge.  Examples of this endeavor include Sparking Change, an activist web publication I produced with my FYC students at SUNY Cortland in the Spring of 2017, as well as Stand Up!, a social web activism project.

I’m also interested in rhetorical history, circulation study, Bruno Latour, Kenneth Burke, disability theory, cognitive neuroscience, media studies, postmodern theory, feminist rhetorics, creative fiction writing, psychoanalysis, modern Irish drama, artificial intelligence, informercials, advertising, consumer culture, branding, ludology, rap/rhetoric, online identity, emotion theory, Power-Knowledge, food rhetorics, hiking, hugging and actively appreciating friendly felines.

During the summer of 2016, I completed my MA in English at the University at Buffalo with a comprehensive thesis project, “Birth of the Authors: Digital Collaboration, Electrate Invention and the Dissenting Voice.” The abstract is included here, and a PDF is available upon request:

Rhetorical invention occurring in the sphere of the social web increasingly takes on the form of collaborators working in tandem with one another to compose and construct.  Poststructural theorists traced notions of authorship through Platonic and modernist histories to contemporary, ecologically-informed conceptions that prove the Romantic myth of the solitary inventor acting in isolation to be a manufactured farce. Locating 21st century authorship between loci of Gregory Ulmer’s proposition of electracy as a successor to literacy and Roland Barthes’ conceptual Death of the Author, this thesis argues web invention to be an inherently collaborative exercise characterized by ecological, socially-conscious procedures and behaviors.

Web invention refuses to conform to the procedures of other mediums, developing its own distinct and unique practices. New technologies offer new avenues for cultural expression that detach themselves from traditional domains and instead take on new, unpredictable lives of their own. A practice of particular relevancy within electrate invention is moderation, an agreement between collaborators wherein the construction of more-desirable webtexts is achieved through community censorship, surveillance and content policing.

Similarly, social web spaces extend political action into realms of online sharing, liking, commenting, remixing, and profile representation. Collaboratively-authored webtexts express ideological values across multi-layered procedures, practices and behaviors, all the while conditioning users to contribute content, emotions and reactions that are politically and socially charged.

As interactions typical of the social web demonstrate, the assemblage forged between humans and nonhuman tools makes collaboration essential for the construction of webtexts, altering rhetorical invention and imposing a newfound emphasis on social ecologies within the invention process.

For a graduate seminar (ENG 585: Digital Rhetorics and Pedagogy), I edited a scholarly video and coded a corresponding website, which you can view here.

My seminar papers at the University at Buffalo (Fall 2015-Spring 2016) include:

  • “Empire Intensified: Post-Postmodern Signifiers, Transnational Neologism and the Neoliberal Economic Reality.”  (ENG 541: Fiction Intensifying).

  • “What Really Happened in Flint? Narrative Tooling, State-Created Terminologies and the Slow Environmental War Against the Poor.”  (ENG 653: Environmentalism Without Guilt).

  • “Justifying Existence: Positioning Autism in a World of Capitalist Expectation.”  (ENG 699: Personal Narratives: Autistry).

  • Leaves, Trees and Images of Suicide: Mirror Stage and the Distortion of the “I” Function in “Good Old Neon” (ENG 502: Introduction to Critical Theory).

I am also a dedicated writer of fiction and autobiographical works.