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My winding path as an educator started nearly twenty-five years ago at Appalachian State University where I taught my first classes as a graduate student. In a developmental writing classroom at (then) Davidson County Community College, however, I fell in love with teaching. A part-time gig led to a full-time faculty position—then to department chair.

After seven years at Davidson (and nearly ten years after completing my graduate coursework), I packed up and headed north to score a doctorate in rhetoric and composition at Northeastern University. Seven years and a PhD later, I left Boston to become Director of Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Metropolitan Campus. In 2018, I left the tangled concrete of northern New Jersey for the Finger Lakes of New York where I was welcomed into my current role as Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Director at Keuka College.

As a writer, scholar, and aging human, I have an eclectic and ever-expanding range of research interests, from the compositional processes of neurodivergent writers, to sexual iconography and feminisms, to science fiction and monster jurisprudence, to rhetoric and stand-up comedy. I am particularly fascinated by the creation, maintenance, and transgression of digital and rhetorical spaces. My writing can be found in Jump Cut, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Studies in American Humor, The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy, The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy, American Political Humor: Masters of Satire and Their Impact on U.S. Policy and Culture, and the Griffith Law Review.

My most recent publication—on watermelon smashing comedian Gallagher—appears in the Journal of American Culture. I also have a piece on legal personhood and Doctor Who forthcoming in an edited collection (Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction).

I am currently working on a book about the rhetorical genius of stand-up legend George Carlin.