In May 2020, I received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, where I specialized in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and was awarded the Fall 2019 Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Award. My scholarly articles have appeared in Enculturation, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Kairos, and elsewhere. My article on "Sylvan Rhetorics" in Rhetoric Review was awarded the NCTE/CCCC 2020 Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication, my article on "A Counterhistory of Rhetorical Ecologies" in Rhetoric Society Quarterly was given Honorable Mention for the ARSTM Article of the Year Award, and my co-authored article on "Deep Mapping for Environmental Communication Design" in Communication Design Quarterly was awarded the NCTE/CCCC 2022 Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Scientific Communication. I co-edited Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature (Lexington Books, 2015).
About Me
I am an assistant professor in the departments of Writing & Rhetoric and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island where I am a Senior Fellow at the Coastal Institute and direct the DWELL Lab. I research the rhetoric of science through social and historical perspectives, teach courses on science writing and environmental advocacy, and practice community-engagement with science using location-based technologies (e.g.—augmented reality and StoryMaps) 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. As part of my place-based research, I am interested in using rhetorical historiography as part of the social justice paradigm shift for environmental communication. My research has received support from a wide range of organizations, from 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 March 2023) and Reflections on the Dark Water (Solomon & George, 2016). Individual poems have appeared in journals such as 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. Recently, 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 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 the Trace Innovation Lab, 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.