Research

My scholarly interests begin at digital, cultural and working-class rhetorics, along with writing studies, political theory (Marxism), electracy and ecocriticism.  I do most of my work in the field of digital rhetoric, often with an orientation civil disobedience rhetorics and new media activism. 

 

I'm also interested in postmodern theory, disability theory, feminist rhetorics, creative fiction writing, psychoanalysis, modern Irish drama, artificial intelligence, informercials, advertising, consumer culture, branding, media studies, ludology, rap/rhetoric, online identity, emotion theory, Power-Knowledge, food rhetorics, hiking, hugging and actively appreciating friendly felines. 

 

Future research projects for me may include examinations and inquiries into utopia rhetorics, corporate business rhetorics, rhetorics of corporate tech empire (specifically Apple), social media identities and discourse, and a Latourian critique of Facebook's various algorithms. 

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During the summer of 2016, I completed my MA in English at the University at Buffalo with a comprehensive thesis project, "Birth of the Authors: Digital Collaboration, Electrate Invention and the Dissenting Voice." The abstract is included here, and a PDF is available upon request: 

 

Rhetorical invention occurring in the sphere of the social web increasingly takes on the

form of collaborators working in tandem with one another to compose and construct.

Poststructural theorists traced notions of authorship through Platonic and modernist histories to

contemporary, ecologically-informed conceptions that prove the Romantic myth of the solitary

inventor acting in isolation to be a manufactured farce. Locating 21st century authorship between

loci of Gregory Ulmer’s proposition of electracy as a successor to literacy and Roland Barthes’

conceptual Death of the Author, this thesis argues web invention to be an inherently

collaborative exercise characterized by ecological, socially-conscious procedures and behaviors.

 

Web invention refuses to conform to the procedures of other mediums, developing its

own distinct and unique practices. New technologies offer new avenues for cultural expression

that detach themselves from traditional domains and instead take on new, unpredictable lives of

their own. A practice of particular relevancy within electrate invention is moderation, an

agreement between collaborators wherein the construction of more-desirable webtexts is

achieved through community censorship, surveillance and content policing.

 

Similarly, social web spaces extend political action into realms of online sharing, liking,

commenting, remixing, and profile representation. Collaboratively-authored webtexts express

ideological values across multi-layered procedures, practices and behaviors, all the while

conditioning users to contribute content, emotions and reactions that are politically and socially

charged.

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As interactions typical of the social web demonstrate, the assemblage forged between

humans and nonhuman tools makes collaboration essential for the construction of webtexts,

altering rhetorical invention and imposing a newfound emphasis on social ecologies within the

invention process.

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For a graduate seminar (ENG 585: Digital Rhetorics and Pedagogy), I edited a scholarly video and coded a corresponding website, which you can view here.

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My seminar papers at the University at Buffalo (Fall 2015-Spring 2016) include: 

• “Empire Intensified: Post-Postmodern Signifiers, Transnational Neologism and the Neoliberal Economic Reality.”  (ENG 541: Fiction Intensifying).

• “What Really Happened in Flint? Narrative Tooling, State-Created Terminologies and the Slow Environmental War Against the Poor.”  (ENG 653: Environmentalism Without Guilt). 

• “Justifying Existence: Positioning Autism in a World of Capitalist Expectation.”  (ENG 699: Personal Narratives: Autistry).

• Leaves, Trees and Images of Suicide: Mirror Stage and the Distortion of the “I” Function in “Good Old Neon” (ENG 502: Introduction to Critical Theory).

 

I am also a dedicated writer of fiction and autobiographical works.