My scholarship examines the relationship between institutional and vernacular rhetorics, particularly the space between official narratives and the ways people experience, interpret, remember, and give language to their lived realities.
I hold a PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University. My academic work draws from rhetoric, narrative identity, feminist theory, public memory, embodiment, and vernacular meaning-making to explore how institutions and individuals construct meaning, whose stories become authoritative, and what happens when institutional narratives and lived experience diverge.
At the center of my scholarship is a question that continues to shape my research, writing, and communication practice:
How do people give language to what they have lived?
I am particularly interested in what institutions say, what people experience, and how language, narrative, memory, identity, and power shape the distance between them.
This inquiry connects my scholarship with my professional work and informs how I think about audience, narrative, credibility, power, and trust.
Areas of Scholarly Interest
My research interests include:
- Institutional and vernacular rhetorics
- Narrative, identity, and meaning-making
- Institutional language and organizational narratives
- Public memory and archives
- Feminist rhetorics
- Lived experience and counternarratives
- Embodiment and identity
- Audience, power, and trust
- Communication ethics
Across these areas, I study how people and institutions use language and narrative to construct meaning, preserve memory, shape identity, and influence what becomes understood as truth.
Dissertation
My dissertation, Princesses, Divas, and Mother Runners, examined women’s identity, motherhood, embodiment, and running through a rhetorical lens. The project was awarded distinction.
The research explored how women use narrative, community, and embodied experience to negotiate identity, motherhood, strength, visibility, resistance, and belonging. Rather than approaching running solely as sport or performance, I examined it as a cultural and rhetorical practice through which women create and communicate meaning.
This research contributed to my broader interest in vernacular rhetorics and the ways lived experience can challenge, complicate, or expand dominant narratives.
Current Research
My current research focuses increasingly on institutional and vernacular narratives, public memory, archives, and the construction of historical meaning.
I am interested in the relationship between official records and lived experience, particularly what happens when institutional accounts and vernacular narratives diverge.
Through archival research, rhetoric, and storytelling, I examine how narratives are constructed, preserved, repeated, challenged, and reconsidered over time. I am particularly interested in whose perspectives become part of the official record, whose remain outside it, and how those choices influence collective understanding and memory.
Editorial & Academic Experience
My academic experience includes scholarly research, writing, editing, teaching, and publication.
I have served as Managing Editor for the (WAC )Journal, a national peer-reviewed journal focused on writing across the curriculum. I have also served as Contributing Editor for QU, Queens University’s literary magazine.
My scholarly work has appeared in Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, Gender, Place & Culture, and Contemporary Drug Problems.
These experiences have strengthened my approach to research, argument, writing, and editorial practice and continue to inform my professional work in strategic communication.