In May 2020, I received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, with a specialization in Rhetoric & Writing Studies, where I was awarded a Preeminence Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Award. My scholarly articles have appeared in Enculturation, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Kairos, and have been recognized by CCCC/NCTE's 2020 Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication, Honorable Mention for the 2022 ARSTM Article of the Year Award, and CCCC/NCTE's 2022 Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Scientific Communication. I am co-editor of Rhetorical Ecologies (NCTE, 2024) and Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature (Lexington Books, 2015). I am presently working on my first scholarly monograph, examining the shared conceptual history of ecosystems and rhetorical ecologies.
About Me
I am an assistant professor in the departments of Professional & Public Writing and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island where I am a Senior Fellow at the Coastal Institute, coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Science Writing and Rhetoric, and direct the DWELL Lab. I research the rhetoric of science and technology (RST) through social and historical perspectives, teach courses on science writing and environmental justice, and practice community-engagement with science using location-based technologies (e.g.—augmented reality and digital maps) as well as creative and digital/visual approaches to science and environmental communication. My research intersects place-based writing and digital rhetoric to understand how locative media provide new possibilities for environmental advocacy and science storytelling. My lab has received support from a wide range of organizations, from the National Science Foundation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, to The National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
My poetry collections are Losing the Dog (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and Reflections on the Dark Water (Solomon & George, 2016). Individual poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review and in anthologies including Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene. I was awarded the 2021 Poetry Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and a 2020 writing residency at Wolff Cottage as part of an award from the Fairhope Center for Writing Arts, as well as previous awards from the Academy of American Poets and a Literary Award from the F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.
In addition to my scholarship and creative writing, I am founder and director of the DWELL Lab at URI, where I apply my research to develop grant-funded digital projects for public advocacy and to provide high-impact experiences for my science and environmental writing courses. I serve as an assistant editor in digital production for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. As both a poet and a digital maker, I am as at home working with line breaks as I am lines of code. Before coming to URI, I was founder and editor-in-chief of Kudzu House Quarterly, a journal of environmental writing and scholarship (now archived at the Institutional Repository at the University of Florida). At UF, I served as an Augmented Reality Criticisms (or ARCs) Coordinator for Trace Innovation, a digital rhetoric initiative at UF, through which I consulted with faculty and graduate students in the development of digital projects, organized digital humanities conferences, and coordinated workshops geared toward undergraduate research. I also served as a Smathers Graduate Intern in Emerging Technologies, creating workshops and tutorials for the UF Marston Science Library's Mobile App Development Environment (MADE@UF) Lab.
Rhetorical Ecologies. Sidney I. Dobrin & Madison Jones (eds.), NCTE, 2024.
Writing the Environment in 19C Amer. Literature. Steven Petersheim & Madison Jones (eds.), Lexington, 2015.
Director, Digital Writing Environments, Location, & Localization (DWELL) Lab at URI
Jones, M., Beveridge, A., MacDonald, H., Greene, A., & Garrison, J. (2022). "Tracking Memes in the Wild: Visual Rhetoric and Image Circulation in Environmental Communication"Frontiers in Communication, 7, DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.883278.