I am currently working on a book titled The New Information Warriors: Rhetoric and Social Change in the Digital Age. This project examines the ways that social media users shape public consciousness about racial justice, disability, climate, anti-capitalism, gender and sexuality, and more. Through grounded theory analysis, the project demonstrates that these modern “information warriors” engage in trial-and-error strategic communication, testing and honing persuasion practices that come to resemble those pioneered by the communications professionals of the 20th century. While practices of “crowd swarming,” “memetic warfare,” and “personal branding” are often assumed to be inconsistent with democratic ideals, my research demonstrates that practices such as these are increasingly central to struggles for social change.

In 2020, my article “‘Sharing a World with Others’: Rhetoric’s Ecological Turn and the Transformation of the Networked Public Sphere" was published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I recently co-authored a piece with Matthew Barton that considers the shifting landscape of the digital public sphere and its implications for the writing classroom (Computers and Composition, 2019). In 2017, I published a chapter in the collection Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (edited by Lisa Melonçon and J. Blake Scott, Routledge). In 2016, I produced a piece of digital scholarship that was published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

I have been awarded UMass Amherst’s Walker Gibson Prize for the best graduate essay on a topic in Rhetoric and Composition, the Rhetoric Society of America's Michael Leff Award, the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Chairs' Memorial Scholarship, and the Rhetoric Society of America's Gerard Hauser Award for the best paper presented by a graduate student at its biennial conference.

My research poses questions about technology, writing, and public discourse that are increasingly relevant to rhetorical education in the 21st century.  In my dissertation, “Rhetorical Investments: Writing, Technology, and the Emerging Logics of the Public Sphere” (2017), I argue that an “infrastructural” model of public discourse lays the groundwork for writing pedagogies that engage students in meaningful reflection about the dynamics of the digital landscape. Through two cases studies—one focusing on “old media” (the turn-of-the-century public lectures of sex educator Emma Elizabeth Walker) and one focusing on “new media” (the #blacklivesmatter discourse that emerged in a viral Facebook thread)—I develop the concept of rhetorical investment. I argue that this concept helps attune us to the ways that individual rhetors contribute to the transformation of the public sphere.