Author of Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism, University of South Carolina Press (2008); co-editor and contributor to Engaging Audience: Writing in an Age of New Literacies, NCTE Press (2009) with Brian Fehler and Angela González; and Women and Rhetoric between the Wars, with Ann George and Janet Zepernick (SIUP, under contract). Articles and chapters on identification in the Smithsonian museums, narrative and identity in city museums, Burkean dialectic as a rhetorical position and a response to war, Burke and New Criticism, Dorothy Day as rhetor, the dialogic personal narrative, the history of style, and civil discourse. President of the TCU Rhetoric/Composition Alumni Society, faculty advisor for Ohio State-Newark's Taproot. Recipient of the Kenneth Burke Society's Emerging Scholar Award (2008); finalist for the International Journal of the Inclusive Museum International Award for Excellence (2010) and Rhetoric Review article of the year (2007); recipient of Ohio State-Newark’s Service Award (2005). Fulbright Fellowship to Ankara, Turkey (1999-2000); Texas Christian University Radford Fellowship (2001); Ohio State-Newark Research and Scholarly Activities Grants (2007, 2009, 2010), and Investment for Impact Grant (2010). Current teaching includes courses in rhetorical theory, research methods, argument, textual analysis, history of English, publishing, and writing style.

My current project looks rhetorically at the ways national museums around the world use--and are used by--the narratives they create to promote and reflect identification with the nation. I'm interested in how cultural manifestations of a national past confront or sustain individual identities, and how national narratives promote particular communal futures. Having gathered data from museums in twenty nations, I'm working on a book using their case studies to explore the epideictic role of musuems as hybrid semantic/poetic spaces. This fall, I'm in Sweden working with the European Union National Museums Project as it examines the role of museums in displaying narratives of the new, transnational identity.