I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English at East Carolina University where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in professional and technical communication. I currently serve as the Chair & Director, of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB). I am also Immediate Past President of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW). I have served as both Director of Undergraduate Studies (2009-2011) and Director of Graduate Studies (2011-2017) in the Department of English.

My research interests include technical writing theory and practice, especially as it relates to rhetorical intervention/engagement, gender studies, and technology; organizational cultures and writing practices especially in medical, health, scientific and academic settings; and professional development and mentoring networks. My previous articles and chapters have appeared in Computers and Composition, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly and several edited collections. I am co-editor of Stories on Mentoring: Theory and Praxis (Parlor Press, 2008), co-author of Primary Research & Writing: People, Places, Spaces (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor of Reclaiming Accountability: Using the Work of Re/Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessment to Improve Writing Instruction and Writing Programs (Utah State UP, 2016).

My edited collection, Key Theoretical Frameworks: Teaching Technical Communication in the 21st Century co-edited with Dr. Angela M. Haas was published in Fall 2018. This collection provides scholars of technical communication with the first collection of essays focused on using social justice and cultural theories to design and teach contemporary undergraduate and graduate courses in technical communication. I’m also working on a collection with Dr. Erin A. Frost, Interrogating Gendered Pathologies, which brings together multiple feminist rhetorical approaches to interrogate the issue of systemic pathologizing of marginalized bodies within the biomedical establishment.

After nine years administering programs, I’ve been working with additional graduate students on projects related to social justice, rhetoric, and technical communication and focusing on research projects that examine how institutional rhetorics and systems discipline certain bodies. I am especially interested in exposing the gendered ways that scientific/medical/health rhetorics and academic rhetorics privilege certain knowledges over embodied knowledges and how we can intervene in some of these practices by disrupting traditional notions of mentoring.

For more on my teaching and research projects, see the above links and my blog.

February 8, 2019