Research Interests

My work focuses on public deliberation, the history of rhetoric, and rhetorics of democracy in the United States and the broader Anglophone world. My current monograph project, Caverns of Fear: Crisis and Containment in the New American Century, explores political debate and controversy in post-Civil Rights United States political culture. The overarching goal of my research is to use historical methods alongside the resources of rhetorical criticism to perform an excavation of the deeper underlying logics of public discourse and demonstrate that the norms and boundaries of debate are themselves a field of struggle. My previous writing has appeared in Art & the Public Sphere, Refractions Journal, Community Literacy Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Teaching Interests

My primary goal as a teacher is to support students in developing their confidence in making arguments that are ethical, informed, and sustained. Focusing on classical and ancient rhetoric, I instruct students to imagine the act of argumentation as a search for the balance between that which is true or just on the one hand and that which is persuasive on the other. In sum, my aim is to show students how the use of written language shapes our perception of the world.