I am a Professor of English, with an emphasis on Digital and Professional Writing, at Slippery Rock University. In terms of research and pedagogy, my interests arose out of a discussion with one of my former Composition and Rhetoric students.
In the middle of class, one of my students argued that he couldn’t rewrite his research essay into a Facebook post. He maintained that he could not think through how his friends and strangers might share and/or comment on his argument. Ever since that conversation, I have been interested in the ways that writers anticipate audience appropriations of their work. More specifically, I have wanted to know how writers build upon the ways audiences have recomposed their, and others’, texts, how writers react to and build upon already circulating texts, and how writers prepare for and against future audience sharing of their texts.
Given my interests, I draw upon Public Rhetoric, Technical Writing, and Circulation Studies methodologies. Drawn together, these methodologies enable me to investigate writers, their composing processes, and publics’ engagement with their texts.
Currently, I am studying the professional communicators at The Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. My project explores how they compose their research documents–reports, infographics, presentations, hashtags, etc–to potentially circulate in local publics. I recently published a part of this research in Reflections: A Journal Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning; the essay is titled “Reaching Backyards and Board Rooms” and can be found at this location.
I am also working on a project in which I explore how circulation has enabled fans to have greater agency over a musician’s ethos through their remixes of and comments on the musician’s texts. Additionally, I am in the early stages of a research project exploring the impact of file formats on the nomos (acceptable and common rhetorics) of publics.
