Rhetoric, Embodiment, Memory, and Meaning-Making
My scholarship examines how people, bodies, communities, and institutions make meaning.
I am especially interested in the places where language is insufficient, contested, silenced, embodied, or still becoming — where stories are carried in the body, shaped by institutions, preserved through memory, or made visible through lived experience.
As a rhetorician, I study communication as more than the transmission of information. Communication is how people construct identity, negotiate power, create belonging, resist erasure, and make sense of the worlds they inhabit. My work is grounded in the belief that rhetoric is not only what we say. It is also what we carry, perform, withhold, inherit, remember, and embody.
My scholarly interests include rhetoric, feminist theory, embodiment, motherhood, running, vernacular meaning-making, institutional communication, memory, identity, silence, and the relationship between personal experience and public meaning.
Across my academic work, I return to the same core questions:
What stories are being told?
Whose stories are being centered?
What truths are being obscured, simplified, or erased?
How do bodies communicate what language cannot yet hold?
How do people make meaning within systems, institutions, and communities that may not fully see them?
My scholarship is rooted in the conviction that communication should reveal what is true, honor what is human, and build trust through integrity.