Research and Academic Focus
I am a rhetorician whose work examines how everyday materials—food, animals, technologies, labor practices, and urban spaces—shape collective life. My scholarship moves across rhetoric and writing studies, queer theory, American studies, critical food studies, and decolonial thought, but it is unified by a central question:
How do ordinary practices become sites of power, dignity, and resistance?
Rather than treating rhetoric as confined to speeches or texts, I study rhetoric as material, ecological, and circulatory. I analyze how meaning moves through objects, infrastructures, bodies, rituals, and environments—and how those movements organize belonging, exclusion, and survival.
Across projects, I investigate:
Material Rhetorics & Circulation – how objects, symbols, and spaces communicate and transform as they move across communities.
Queer Community Formation – how everyday practices, particularly around food and shared space, generate kinship, memory, and counterpublics.
Urban & Animal Rhetorics – how figures such as the rat circulate through literature, media, and policy to produce narratives of race, labor, abjection, and governance.
Rhetorics of Labor & Technology – how AI systems, surveillance, and workplace infrastructures reshape authorship, agency, and accountability in contemporary economies.
Decolonial & Global Rhetorical Traditions – how rhetorical theory must move beyond narrow Western canons to account for global epistemologies and power formations.
My work is deeply informed by affect theory and critical materialism, with particular attention to how emotions—shame, pride, disgust, pleasure, dignity—structure social hierarchies and communal life. I am especially interested in how marginalized communities build durable forms of belonging within systems designed to constrain them.
Professional Expertise
I am trained in rhetoric and writing studies, and I approach writing not as a static skill set but as a meta-disciplinary practice: a way of thinking, analyzing, and intervening in the world.
My teaching and consulting expertise includes:
Rhetorical theory (classical, global, and decolonial traditions)
Argumentation and source synthesis
Research design and academic literacy
AI ethics, authorship, and digital writing
Writing in the workplace and rhetorics of labor
Curriculum design grounded in threshold concepts and recursive learning
In the classroom, I design courses that foreground rhetoric as a practical tool for navigating contemporary life—particularly at the intersections of technology, labor, identity, and community. My pedagogy emphasizes critical inquiry, rhetorical listening, and the ethical circulation of knowledge.
Beyond academia, I collaborate with arts organizations and community partners on grant writing, public humanities initiatives, and strategic communication projects that bridge scholarship and civic life.
A Profile in Teaching and Scholarship
My work as a scholar and teacher is grounded in rhetoric and writing studies, with a sustained focus on how material practices shape collective life. I approach rhetoric not simply as persuasion, but as an ecological and circulatory force that organizes belonging, exclusion, labor, and power.
My research examines how everyday practices—foodways, urban iconography, animal representation, digital infrastructures, and workplace technologies—function as sites of rhetorical production. Across these projects, I investigate how marginalized communities generate dignity and counterpublics within systems structured by neoliberal governance, racial capitalism, and heteronormativity. Whether analyzing queer food networks, urban rat iconography, or AI-driven workplace surveillance, my scholarship asks how material conditions mediate agency and how rhetoric operates beyond the page.
My teaching is inseparable from this research agenda. In the writing classroom, I treat rhetoric as a meta-disciplinary practice that equips students to analyze and intervene in the systems that structure their lives. I draw on threshold concepts in writing studies to help students understand writing not as a static skill, but as recursive, socially situated, and epistemologically transformative. Courses I design foreground questions of labor, technology, identity, and power, inviting students to see writing as both analytical method and ethical responsibility.
As a first-generation college student, I experienced firsthand how access to rhetorical knowledge can function as a gatekeeping mechanism. That experience informs my commitment to transparency in pedagogy: I make the conventions of academic discourse visible, interrogate their histories, and invite students to critique and repurpose them. My classrooms are rigorous and conceptually driven, but also structured to foster intellectual risk-taking and belonging.
Based in Baltimore and intellectually shaped by my academic formation in New York, my work remains attentive to urban space, community engagement, and the public humanities. I collaborate with local arts and cultural institutions, integrate community-based research into my pedagogy, and design assignments that bridge academic analysis with lived environments.
At its core, my professional identity is defined by a commitment to advancing rhetoric and writing studies as disciplines capable of addressing contemporary crises—technological, ecological, and political—while remaining accountable to the communities whose lives are most shaped by them.
Intellectual Trajectory
My path to academia was not linear. Before returning to graduate study, I spent several years in publishing and nonprofit work, moving across editorial, training, and sales roles. That professional experience exposed me to the infrastructures of knowledge production and the market logics that shape whose voices circulate—and whose do not.
When I was laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, the precarity of labor became more than an abstraction. That moment clarified what had long been evident: questions of authorship, value, and expendability are not merely theoretical—they structure everyday life. In Fall 2020, I returned to teaching first-year and technical writing, and soon after began doctoral study in order to pursue those questions more rigorously.
My intellectual commitments have evolved in meaningful ways during that process. I have worked to move beyond narrow Eurocentric frameworks and to interrogate homonormative assumptions that replicate the exclusions they claim to resist. Engaging decolonial theory, affect studies, and global rhetorical traditions has reshaped how I understand power—not simply as ideology, but as something embedded in material practices, infrastructures, and habits of thought.
These shifts have deepened my commitment to scholarship that matters beyond the page. For me, this does not mean abandoning theoretical rigor; it means insisting that theory remain accountable to lived experience. Whether analyzing queer food communities, urban animal iconography, or AI-mediated labor systems, I attend closely to language, circulation, and embodied practice. I am interested in how rhetoric organizes relationships, produces dignity and indignity, and enables communities to endure and imagine otherwise.
Dialogue remains central to both my teaching and research. Influenced by traditions of critical inquiry and praxis, I structure classrooms around collaborative knowledge production and intellectual risk-taking. At the same time, I maintain high expectations and conceptual rigor, inviting students to see themselves as participants in ongoing disciplinary and civic conversations.
Teaching and scholarship, in my work, are mutually sustaining practices. Both are grounded in the belief that rhetoric is not merely a tool of persuasion but a living force—one that shapes labor conditions, community formation, technological systems, and cultural memory. My trajectory reflects an ongoing commitment to understanding that force more precisely, and to using it more responsibly.
I bring over fifteen years of experience designing writing and rhetoric curricula grounded in conceptual rigor, intellectual transparency, and student agency. My pedagogy is informed by writing studies research, particularly threshold concepts and recursive models of composing, and by critical traditions that position education as a site of inquiry rather than compliance.
I treat college writing not as remediation or rule enforcement, but as disciplinary initiation. Students in my courses learn to understand writing as socially situated, epistemologically complex, and materially consequential. I foreground rhetorical analysis, research design, and source synthesis while making the conventions of academic discourse visible and interrogable.
My courses frequently engage themes such as labor, technology, food systems, identity, and community formation—inviting students to apply rhetorical frameworks to the material conditions shaping their lives. I integrate discussions of AI, authorship, and digital literacy into writing instruction, equipping students to navigate contemporary technological environments with both analytical precision and ethical awareness.
Across levels—from first-year writing to advanced courses in rhetoric—I emphasize dialogue, structured intellectual risk-taking, and the cultivation of transferable meta-knowledge about writing. My classrooms are rigorous, theory-informed spaces designed to foster critical agency and sustained engagement.
Research
My research develops along two intersecting trajectories: rat rhetorics and queer food communities. Together, these projects examine how marginal figures and everyday practices illuminate the material and affective dimensions of rhetoric.
Rat rhetorics investigates how the rat functions as a symbolic and discursive figure across literature, urban space, and political rhetoric. In the Anglo imagination, rats have long been cast as vermin—disease-bearing, hyper-reproductive, morally suspect. Yet their persistence in nineteenth-century British literature and contemporary urban discourse reveals less about the animal itself than about human anxieties surrounding class, race, contagion, labor, and the boundaries of the human. Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect studies, and critical animal studies, I trace how the rat circulates as a figure of abjection and governance, and I examine how queering this figure unsettles liberal humanist ideals of order, purity, and disposability.
Alongside this work, I theorize queer food communities as sites of material rhetoric and counterpublic formation. I analyze how shared meals, potlucks, cookbooks, and informal food networks function as infrastructures of belonging that exceed heteronormative and privatized models of kinship. Drawing on rhetorical circulation, queer theory, and critical food studies, I argue that food practices operate as embodied arguments about dignity, survival, and collective world-making. Here, food is not metaphor but medium: a material practice through which identity, solidarity, and refusal are enacted.
Across both trajectories, I am concerned with how rhetoric organizes marginal life. Whether in the reviled figure of the rat or in the communal act of sharing food, I examine how abjection is rhetorically produced—and how those marked as excessive, unsanitary, or out-of-place nonetheless craft durable forms of survival and belonging. My work contributes to rhetoric and writing studies by expanding the field’s understanding of materiality, circulation, and the affective infrastructures that sustain community under conditions of constraint.
Service
My service work bridges academic, cultural, and community institutions, reflecting my commitment to rhetoric as a public and civic practice.
I serve in leadership and development roles with the Charm City Fringe Festival, where my work includes board service, fundraising strategy, grant writing, and communications. In this capacity, I contribute to sustaining Baltimore’s independent arts ecosystem and expanding access to experimental performance spaces. This engagement reflects my broader interest in public humanities, cultural circulation, and the infrastructures that support creative communities.
Based in Baltimore, I actively support local institutions that operate at the intersection of art, activism, and cooperative economics, including community-centered spaces such as Red Emma’s and Clifton Pleasure Club. I am particularly invested in mutual aid initiatives and grassroots cultural networks that foreground solidarity, sustainability, and collective care. These commitments inform both my scholarship on material rhetoric and my approach to institutional collaboration.
Within the academy, I contribute through committee service when possible and through sustained mentorship. I provide ongoing professional development support to former students, offering consultation on graduate applications, CVs, cover letters, and professional writing long after course completion. I view this work not as ancillary but as an extension of writing pedagogy: equipping students to navigate the rhetorical demands of professional and academic life.
Alongside my partner, Garrick Houston, I support a range of local charitable initiatives and arts organizations. Together, we remain committed to strengthening the cultural and civic life of the communities in which we live and work.
Across institutional and community contexts, my service reflects a consistent orientation toward building durable infrastructures for creative, intellectual, and collective life.