My research engages three of my reckless passions: teaching, writing, and performing. I explore how our everyday performances of storytelling create the rich social worlds we live in, including the various violences we do to each other through divisions and exclusions. As such, I am particularly focused on issues of citizenship, identity, and betrayal in community life. Academically, I specialize in critical cultural studies of the rhetoric and performance of everyday life.
As a teacher of college writing, my current doctoral research explores how academic writing is always and already intertwined with embodied issues of identity and performance. I am committed to projects geared toward decolonizing academic writing — toward connecting our bodies and identities in more consequential ways with our writing.
For example, one of my current research projects explores how acts of speaking in a writing classroom contribute to our understanding of writing as an embodied and communal process. These acts span a range of speaking genres, from informal dialogic conversations to impromptu debates to structured presentations to speeches to dramatic enactments. Each of these acts works against various academic genres that seek to continually dis-embody texts — by keeping our bodies closely engaged with the texts we produce, we make writing an act that does not simply deposit words on a page, but an act that engages the page as a stage for a consequential encounter with you, our readers.