I am a Rhetoric and Composition generalist, with a special interest in critical historical methods and discourse studies. At present, most of my work is in the following areas, often with significant overlap:
histories of rhetoric and composition
digital archives and historiography
multilingual writing and pedagogy
feminist rhetorics and rhetorical theory.
My main writing project, Irony’s Resource, investigates irony as a critical paradigm for feminist historiography, based on its epistemic functions in women's political discourse. I have recently finished co-authoring GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the 21st Century (Parlor Press, 2011), which examines identity formation in a generation of rhetoric and composition professionals who have had explicit preparation in the scholarly dimensions of writing program work. During the 2011-2012 academic year, I will work with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University to develop the prototype for an open-source knowledge base that collects, organizes, and visually presents metadata on feminist treatises in rhetoric and composition. I have begun a new project that considers women's irony as third-culture discourse in international contexts for diplomacy. Together with Patricia Sullivan (Purdue University), I am also investigating how advances in digital humanities impact both historiography in rhetorical theory and the education of new historians of rhetoric. Finally, another new project will consider "indigenous" sites for theorizing a rhetoric of multilingualism at various intersections of discourse, composition, and second-language writing studies.