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 ecocriticism, civil disobedience composing and social web activism.  I do most of my work within the discipline of composition and rhetoric, typically incorporating discussion of creative and critical thinking, media theory, neuroscience and pedagogical theory into my writing.  I approach teaching as a research project, and actively seek avenues in which my scholarly inquiries and my classrooms might converge.

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

Future research projects for me may include examinations and inquiries into utopia rhetorics, corporate business rhetorics, rhetorics of corporate tech empire (specifically Apple), social media identities and discourse, and a Latourian critique of Facebook’s various content-molding algorithms.

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.