Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

I am an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Appalachian State University. I am former Director of the Writing Center and Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department’s Writing Program at Northeastern University. Before Northeastern, I was faculty at Wake Forest University where I taught writing and gender studies. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro specializing in rhetoric and composition, human rights discourse, and transnational gender studies. While completing my Ph.D. I spent time as a Research Associate at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. 

My current research focuses on human rights and temporality. My monograph, provisionally titled _The Right Time: Human Rights, Temporality and Rhetorical Invention_ examines temporality and invention in difficult human rights claims. My work has been published in collections by MLA, Ohio State Press, and Routledge and journals including Philosophy and Rhetoric, College Literature, and Comparative Literature Studies. 
 
My teaching focuses on introductory and advanced level writing, including advocacy, social justice, and community-based writing, rhetoric and composition studies, gender studies, human rights, postcolonial studies, and global studies.  

Recent GWS scholarship

"The Public Fallout of the Humanities’ Crisis: Critiquing the Public Turn in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” Co-authored with Tonya Ritola and Mary Beth Pennington. Rendezvous Journal of Arts and Letters (Crisis in the Humanities Special Edition). Idaho State University. 43.1 (2017): 95-109. Print

“Precaritization in the Security State: Ambient Akairos in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary:” Co-authored with Alexandra Moore. Precarious Rhetorics. Ed. Wendy S. Hesford; Adela C. Licona; Christa Teston. First Issue of New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality, published by The Ohio State University Press, 2018.