My Scholarship
My scholarship examines how people make meaning through language, identity, embodiment, memory, movement, and lived experience.
I hold a PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University. My academic work is rooted in rhetoric, feminist theory, embodiment, vernacular meaning-making, narrative identity, and the ways people use language, story, and movement to understand themselves and the world around them.
At the center of my scholarship is a question that continues to shape all of my work:
How do people give language to what they have lived?
That question guides my research, writing, teaching, communication practice, and embodied wellness work. It is also the thread connecting my academic scholarship to my professional work in strategic communication and my creative work as a writer.
I am especially interested in the space between institutional voice and human experience. Institutions often speak in official language, policies, public statements, records, and archives. People speak through memory, story, body, silence, grief, resistance, identity, and lived truth. My scholarship lives in that space between what is officially said and what is deeply experienced.
This is where rhetoric matters.
Rhetoric is not simply persuasion. It is the study and practice of how language, audience, context, identity, power, and meaning interact. Rhetoric asks how stories are shaped, who gets to tell them, who is believed, what is remembered, what is silenced, and how truth becomes visible.
My scholarly work is grounded in the conviction that communication should reveal what is true, honor what is human, and build trust through integrity.
Areas of Scholarly Interest
My research and writing are shaped by several intersecting areas of inquiry:
- Rhetoric and meaning-making
- Feminist theory
- Embodiment and identity
- Motherhood and women’s lived experience
- Running as communication
- Vernacular rhetorics
- Narrative identity
- Institutional language and public memory
- Archives, records, and hidden histories
- Silence, erasure, and truth-telling
- Writing as a form of restoration
- Communication ethics
- Audience, trust, and human-centered communication
Across these areas, I study how people and institutions use language to create 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.
In this work, I studied how women make meaning through running, storytelling, community, and embodied experience. Rather than treating running only as a sport, fitness activity, or performance metric, my dissertation examined running as a cultural and rhetorical practice.
I was interested in how women use running to negotiate identity, motherhood, strength, visibility, resistance, and belonging. Running became a way to study how the body communicates with the self, with others, and with the world.
This dissertation became the foundation for my broader framework of Running Rhetorics.
Running Rhetorics
I created and coined Running Rhetorics as a theoretical framework for understanding running as a form of communication.
Running is not only something we do. Running speaks.
Running Rhetorics studies the dynamic relationship between body, self, and world. Through this framework, running becomes a rhetorical act. It reveals, resists, persuades, remembers, and creates meaning. It gives form to experiences that often have no language.
Running Rhetorics moves beyond pace, performance, aesthetics, and competition. It asks what running means, what running makes possible, and what running allows us to say when words are not enough.
This framework connects my scholarship, writing, coaching, and lived experience. It reflects my larger belief that communication does not happen only through words. It also happens through bodies, stories, movement, memory, choices, relationships, and silence.
Rhetoric, Audience, and Meaning
As a rhetorician, I understand audience as central to meaningful communication.
An audience is not merely a demographic, a stakeholder group, or a set of assumptions. Audiences are made of people, each with their own fears, values, expectations, needs, histories, and hopes.
To communicate well, we have to move beyond generalized messaging and listen deeply enough to understand what people are truly asking to hear. Meaningful communication requires empathy, discernment, audience intelligence, and the integrity to speak with clarity, specificity, and care.
This understanding of audience shapes both my scholarship and my professional communication practice. Whether I am studying women runners, analyzing institutional narratives, writing about public memory, advising executives, or teaching students, I return to the same belief:
Communication is most powerful when it helps people feel seen, understand what matters, and trust what is being said.
Scholarship, Writing, and Public Truth
My current scholarly and creative work is increasingly concerned with story, memory, institutions, archives, and public truth.
I am interested in the stories families, communities, and institutions preserve, distort, inherit, and reclaim. I am also interested in the role rhetoric plays in making hidden truths visible.
This work grows from my belief that scholarship should not remain isolated from lived experience. Research can help us name what has been obscured. Writing can help us restore what has been silenced. Rhetoric can help us understand how narratives are built, how they travel, and how they shape what people believe.
For me, scholarship is not only an academic practice. It is a way of listening carefully, reading deeply, questioning inherited narratives, and giving language to truths that deserve to be heard.
Editorial and Academic Experience
My academic experience includes scholarly writing, research, 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 and academic work has appeared in publications and platforms including Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, Gender, Place & Culture, and Contemporary Drug Problems.
These experiences have shaped my approach to writing, research, publication, and editorial work. They have also deepened my commitment to helping people clarify ideas, strengthen arguments, and communicate with precision, integrity, and care.
Teaching and Intellectual Practice
My scholarship also informs how I teach, mentor, coach, and communicate.
I believe students and readers deserve work that is intellectually rigorous and deeply human. I am interested in teaching writing, rhetoric, communication, research, and embodied meaning-making in ways that help people understand not only how language works, but why it matters.
For me, intellectual work is not separate from life. It is one way we learn to notice, interpret, question, connect, and become more fully awake to the world.
My Scholarly Conviction
My scholarship is rooted in a simple conviction:
Communication should reveal what is true, honor what is human, and build trust through integrity.
That conviction guides my work as a rhetorician, writer, researcher, communications executive, and embodied performance and wellness coach.
Whether I am studying running, writing about memory, analyzing institutional narratives, teaching students, or shaping stories for public audiences, my purpose remains the same:
To give language to lived experience, create meaning through story, and communicate in ways people can trust.