I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University. My primary area of research and teaching is rhetoric and composition. My recently completed dissertation examines rhetoric at the boundaries of the traditionally discrete categories of "culture" and "nature." That is, it explores rhetoric as the cultivation (both semiotic and material) of bodies and environments. What we know as “human nature” continually emerges by virtue of rhetorical cultivation within social, biological, and environmental dramas. As long as theorizers, teachers, and practitioners of rhetoric (in all its disciplinary manifestations) hold “nature” (in all of its social, biological, and environmental complexity) to be stable and/or a priori, as well as distinct and thus cut-off from rhetorical agency, they will continue to reinscribe the weak defense of rhetoric (as described by Richard Lanham) and the Platonism upon which it is predicated. It is for two reasons, the hope of sustainable human practices and the institutional credit needed to promote them, that rhetoric must respond, fully armed, to disciplinary challenges.
As a teacher, I work to foster student engagement (with themselves, each other, and the world at large), to promote quality work by expecting the best work from each student, and to endorse rhetoric as vital to public and private life. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, I continually work to examine the ethical implications of my pedagogy, acknowledging that if education is more than objective knowledge-banking then it is certainly more personal, more participatory, and thus much more ethically precarious.
Recent Publications
"I Told U So! Classical and Contemporary Ethos and the Stabilization of Self." The Responsibilities of Rhetoric. Ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010. 281-288.
Abstract: Classical notions of ethos work (intentionally or not) to stabilize a specific notion of the self as singular, insulated and authentic. Ethos, in Aristotelian schemes, is a tool for revealing this stable self to an audience. I critique this construction of ethos in order to explore other ethical constructions that are more reflective of rhetorical notions or conceptions of “self.” Cognitive scientist Andy Clark’s notion of the “soft self” offers an opportunity to reconsider ethos as relatively stable and self-authored. Clark’s work gives voice to the “role of context, culture, environment, and technology in the constitution of individual human persons.” A notion of the self constituted through the “mingling” of various contextual and contingent elements specifically invokes the sophistry of Gorgias and the productive, shape-shifting rhetoric he enacts. Refiguring ethos in this, we find rhetoric responsible not just for the transmission of selves but for their very constitution.
"Productive Mess: First-Year Composition Takes the University's Agonism Online." Kairos 13.2 (2009): Praxis Section. Co-authored with Marc C. Santos, and Ryan P. Weber.
Abstract: This webtext describes a pilot course that united four first-year composition courses around shared readings and online discussion addressing the physical and virtual university. The goal of the pilot was to foster previously impossible student interactions by exploring how discrete discussion roles shaped interaction and reputations among students.
"Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 38.3 (2008): 189-206.
Abstract: In this article the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author positions technical and professional communication not simply as transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.
Works in Progress
"Productive Strife: Clark’s Cognitive Science and Rhetorical Agonism." Co-authored with Jeremy Tirrell
Abstract: This article posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition (or the extended mind) manifests in the agonism of social activity, and that a rhetorical perspective permits an understanding of human conflict as a productive and necessary element in collective responses to situations rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the article draws connections between Clark's project and rhetorical theory. First, between Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions and the classical concept of kairos which implies that the identity of the rhetor emerges in response to situated environmental conditions. Second, between Clark’s assertion that "the role of language is to guide and shape our own behavior" (Being There 195), and long-held position in rhetoric that language is not merely expressive but constitutive. Last, the article presents a current, practical humanities project that complements its theoretical perspective with real-world praxis. The text explored is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is a manifestation (even in its controversial status) of much of what Clark and rhetorical theorists have to say about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and of shared cognition.