I am an Associate Professor of English/Writing Studies and Director of the Writing Program at Illinois State University (ISU), with a PhD in rhetoric and composition from the University of Louisville.

As a writing program administrator, I am committed to feminist mentoring, pedagogies, and administrative actions that increase transparency, support writing students and instructors, and advocate for educational equity. At ISU, I focus on teaching and mentoring writing teachers in ISU’s innovative writing program that privileges literate activity research with an emphasis on everyday writing research, writing researcher identities, and contemporary learning-writing research. My administrative and teaching work are characterized by rhetorical listening, ethics of care, and digital and multimodal pedagogies to facilitate collaborative, active learning.

In my research, as in my teaching and administrative work, I explicitly create space for newcomers’ identities and experiences to feel valued and to be framed as valuable. My dissertation, “Stories at Work: Restorying Narratives of New Teachers’ Identity Learning in Writing Studies,” began a longitudinal artifact-based interview study eliciting stories of teaching and learning from new graduate student writing instructors. Grounded in deep rhetorical listening to newcomers’ stories, this project is currently in its seventh year with the primary goal of activating narrative as a complex interdisciplinary feminist methodology for tracing the situated identity learning of new writing teachers both in and over time. In addition to narrative research and new writing teacher preparation, my research areas include feminist research methodologies, feminist pedagogies, multimodal pedagogies, writing pedagogies, and the intersections of identities, learning, and literacy in workplace, school-based, and community sites.

Most recently, I collaborated with co-editors Derek Mueller (Virginia Tech) and Logan Bearden (Eastern Michigan) on Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts (2021), an open access edited collection on the intersections between writing program administration and visual rhetorics. I have collaborative publications in Computers and Composition Online, Kairos, College English, and Mobility Work in Composition (2021), and have published in JAC and in Writing for Engagement: Responsive Practice for Social Action and contributed to “Passageways and Betweenity: A Brenda Jo Brueggemann Retrospective” as part of Composition Forum’s Special Issue on Composition in the Presence of Disability. 

My teaching experience includes graduate-level writing pedagogy and advanced composition courses at Illinois State University (Normal, IL); graduate-level writing pedagogy and first-year writing courses at Eastern Michigan University (Ypsilanti, MI); graduate-level education, first-year composition, and American literature courses at the University of Louisville; first-year composition courses at Valencia College (Kissimmee, FL); and dual-credit, Advanced Placement, American literature, and research writing courses at St. Cloud High School (St. Cloud, FL). In all of my teaching, I prioritize creating structures for collaborative, active learning and emphasize the rhetorical and pedagogical affordances of everyday multimodal making.