I am a rhetorical scholar working at the intersection of rhetorical studies, cultural and political theory, affect and emotion studies, and digital culture. My research examines how rhetoric produces forms of relationality: how we come to understand ourselves in relation to others, what kinds of relationships become imaginable or desirable, and what forms of social life those relationships make possible. My current research project, Love at the End of the World, examines the rhetoric of love in contemporary culture and politics, asking how appeals to love respond to experiences of loneliness, political fragmentation, technological change, and the pressures of contemporary subjectivity. Across this work, I am particularly interested in how media and emerging technologies reshape the conditions under which intimacy, community, and collective life become possible.

My teaching is grounded in the belief that education is fundamentally about cultivating judgment. I do not teach students what to think; I aim to give them better tools with which to think. In courses ranging from rhetorical criticism to interviewing to interpersonal communication to LGBTQ studies, I ask students to interpret arguments carefully, evaluate competing claims, understand perspectives they may ultimately reject, and develop thoughtful positions of their own. I approach teaching as a form of praxis in which theoretical ideas are brought into conversation with lived experience and contemporary culture.

Because I understand education as a relational practice, I emphasize intellectual curiosity, generosity, and sustained engagement with complexity. Students encounter rhetoric not simply as a means of persuasion, but as a way of understanding how discourse shapes identities, relationships, institutions, and possibilities for collective life. I also encourage students to critically examine the technologies that increasingly mediate how we communicate and think, asking not only what technologies enable us to do, but what kinds of thinking and relating they encourage.

Across both my research and teaching, I am interested in a common question: How do our ways of relating shape the worlds we inhabit, and how might rhetoric help us imagine different ways of being together?