Research Summary
Research interests include digital, multimodal, sonic and other sensory rhetorics. I am also interested in writing and rhetoric's relationship to environmental communication, religion, and historiography.
Education
- B.A., Communication, University of Arizona
- B.A., English | Literature , Arizona State University
- B.A.E, English | Education, Arizona State University
- M.A., English | Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Ph.D., English | Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Project: “Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of American Vernacular Music in the 1930s”
Biography
I study writing and rhetoric as emergent from and constitutive of the mythologies that accompany notions of technological and cultural advance. My current research is focused on the ongoing impact of the persisting mythos of the American West on contemporary and historical efforts at environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty, and racial justice.
I am also engaged in work that theorizes the rhetorical affordances of sound. I have published work on recorded sound’s influence in historical, cultural, and vernacular contexts, usually as folksongs, but also as popular music, religious podcasts, and radio programs.
My NEH supported book, Listening to the Lomax Archive was published in 2021 by the University of Michigan Press. The book investigates the careers of John A. Lomax and his son Alan during the Great Depression with focus on field recordings made for and stored by the Library of Congress's archive at the American Folklife Center. It is available as an open source publication with streaming audio content here: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/v405sc60h