Research and Academic Focus
My research explores the intersections of several disciplines, including Rhetoric, American Studies, and Queer Theory. My work is driven by a deep commitment to decoloniality and affect theory, as I investigate how emotions and power dynamics shape social and cultural experiences. A central part of my research involves analyzing material rhetoric and rhetorical circulation, examining how objects, places, and texts communicate meaning and move through different communities. I am particularly interested in understanding how queer communities build a sense of belonging and create spaces for connection. Additionally, my research extends to Critical Food Studies, where I explore the social, cultural, and political dimensions of food and its role in shaping identity, community, and power structures.
Professional Expertise
My academic foundation is in rhetoric, and I consider myself first and foremost a rhetorician. However, my interdisciplinary interests have created significant crossover, allowing me to draw on a rich theoretical and methodological toolkit from these fields. This integrated approach allows for a nuanced exploration of complex issues.
In addition to my research, I am a dedicated academic writing instructor with extensive experience teaching expository, argumentative, and technical writing. I am currently available for consulting engagements, providing support for grant proposals and other academic projects.
A Profile in Teaching and Scholarship
My professional identity is rooted in two distinct yet interconnected academic environments: Baltimore, Maryland, where I am currently based, and Brooklyn, New York, which I consider my intellectual home. This bicoastal perspective informs my approach to both research and teaching, allowing me to draw on the unique cultural and academic energies of each city. Outside of my scholarly pursuits, I am a devoted companion to my cats, and find joy and inspiration in their simple presence. In my free time, I am engrossed in developing innovative teaching materials and pursuing new avenues of research.
My passion for teaching stems from a formative experience as a first-generation college student, where I encountered an instructor whose approach to pedagogy felt dated and disengaged. This experience cemented my commitment to fostering a dynamic and forward-thinking classroom environment. I am driven to be an educator who not only imparts knowledge but also cultivates a sense of intellectual excitement and belonging for every student. My core purpose is to embody the spirit of the intrepid intellectual discoverer, using my expertise as a professor and lecturer to illuminate the critical and often overlooked contributions of the humanities to contemporary conversations.
How did I get here? I ask myself that question often. After several years in publishing and NGO work—moving through editorial, training, and sales—I found myself in Maryland. When I was laid off during the pandemic, a moment that underscored how exploitable and expendable labor can be, I chose to stop running from what I truly care about. In Fall 2020, after a decade away, I returned to teaching first-year writing and technical writing. Soon after, with the encouragement of my partner, I applied to a doctoral program to pursue research more deeply.
Since then, my intellectual commitments have shifted significantly. I am working to decolonize my thinking—moving away from Eurocentric frameworks—and to question homonormative assumptions that mirror heteronormativity. I am grateful for this growth. More importantly, I want my research to matter for the communities it addresses. That requires more than crunching numbers or coding interviews; it means paying close attention to language, behavior, and nuance, and honoring the complexities that shape lived experience.
At the center of both my teaching and research is a commitment to dialogue. I ground my classrooms in a blend of Socratic inquiry and Freirean praxis, encouraging students not only to question received wisdom but also to recognize the power they hold in shaping knowledge. That same ethos drives my scholarship: whether I am writing about queer food communities, rat rhetorics, or the intersections of labor and language, I aim to show how rhetoric is a living force that organizes relationships, sustains communities, and resists systems of domination. Teaching and research, for me, are inseparable—they are ways of learning with others, not just about them, and of working toward more just and inclusive futures.
I have spent over 15 years developing unique curriculums and engages projects with a student-centered philosophy. The point of college education is to begin the training process for engaging academic study. It is not a continuation of the carceral-style of education you find in most k-12 and colonial academic education in the U.S.
Research
My research develops along two intersecting but distinct trajectories: rat rhetorics and queer food communities. Rat rhetorics examines how rats function as symbolic and discursive figures across literature, culture, and everyday life. In the Anglo imagination, rats have long been cast as vermin—disease-bearing, hyper-reproductive, and morally suspect—yet their persistence in texts and public discourse reveals less about the animal itself than about human anxieties around class, filth, and the boundaries of the human. My work traces these cultural constructions in nineteenth-century British literature and their afterlives in contemporary urban and political rhetoric, queering the rat to highlight how abjection and survival unsettle liberal humanist ideals of order and purity.
Alongside this, I study queer food communities: the spaces where LGBTQ+ people gather, eat, and build shared worlds. Meals and food rituals become sites of intimacy, resilience, and counterpublic formation, where kinship is reimagined beyond heteronormative or familial structures. Drawing on rhetorical theory, food studies, and queer theory, I examine how practices like potlucks, communal cooking, and food sharing not only sustain life but also generate critical possibilities for belonging and refusal. Here, food is not merely sustenance but a medium for identity, solidarity, and critique.
Together, these projects chart the symbolic and material dimensions of marginal life. Whether in the figure of the rat—reviled yet resilient—or in the communal act of sharing food—mundane yet transformative—I seek to show how rhetoric encodes abjection and how those marked as excessive or out-of-place nonetheless craft ways of surviving, thriving, and imagining otherwise.
Service
My husband, GarrickHouston.com, and I support a number of local charities. I also serve on committees when possible, and provide free consulting and proofreading services to every student who takes my classes after they’ve successfully completed the course. This includes cover letters, resumes, CVs, and transfer letters.
Teaching
My work circles two unlikely but deeply connected sites of inquiry: rats and food. On one side, rat rhetorics tracks how rats—reviled as filthy, diseased, excessive—become symbolic laborers in culture. In Victorian literature and beyond, they stand in for everything society wants to expel: the poor, the colonized, the queer, the ungovernable. Yet rats persist. They slip through walls, survive the sewers, gnaw through the categories that are supposed to contain them. To study the rhetoric of rats is to study how disgust works, how abjection polices boundaries, and how figures of survival get turned into emblems of threat. In queering the rat, I ask what happens if we read this creature not only as vermin but as a critic—a figure that exposes the fragility of human exceptionalism and the fantasies of order we cling to.
On the other side, I study queer food communities: potlucks, kitchen tables, and shared meals where LGBTQ+ people reimagine kinship and belonging. Food here is not neutral—it’s a rhetorical medium through which care, critique, and resistance take shape. These spaces turn sustenance into solidarity, where recipes carry memory, and where eating together
The Stripasaurus Rex to the right is named Brutus, Marcus Junius Brutus to be exact. You will find my other cats under the Catbook tab. Brutus, whose prison name was Bruce, came to us via North Carolina via the underground pet railroad. He was in a terrible accident as a kitten and found badly beaten, missing hair with open sores. An amazing, anonymous rescue worker found him and shipped him up to Brooklyn so that he wouldn’t be destroyed. We will be forever grateful for him and for that person. A small reminder that there’s so much good in the world. I love this cat more than anything in the world!