Research Interests: feminist rhetorics, gender studies, disability studies, new materialist and feminist science studies, composition and pedagogy, voice and invention in the first-year writing classroom

As an interdisciplinary scholar in English studies with increasing interest in writing, rhetoric and professional communication, my research uses rhetorical theories and frameworks to asks how different cultural discourses and objects of the 20th and 21st centuries explore, theorize, and/or efface the materiality of sex, gender, ability and race. How do culturally-produced objects comment on the irreducibility of [bodily] matter and expand representational possibilities? Can some viable concept of “the body” or embodiment be captured in writing?

In addition to rhetorical theories, my work makes use of feminist theory, disability studies and trans studies scholarship to interrogate and contextualize established narratives around embodiment found in specific cultural texts, such as literature and art and social structures such as sex-segregated sports and medical discourse. I am particularly interested in rhetorics of cure and disease and the ways writers have resisted such pathologizing discourse, including through the co-optation of medicalized language, and have explored this interest across the fields of both Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), and English Literature of the modernist and contemporary periods.