Education
- BA (Berkeley)
- MA (Sonoma State)
- PhD (University of Southern California)
Biography
I am interested broadly in the theories and practices of rhetoric, and in the compositional relationships among the word, the self, and the world. From intimate dialogue to social activism to academic writing, I analyze what people try to do, manage to do, and fail to do with words, and suggest what we might do differently to fail a little less often. I have written about, among other things, humour (Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy 2010; “‘Comedy is What We’re Really About’: The Grateful Dead in a Comic Frame” 2020), protest movements (“How Not to Stop a Pipeline: A Critique of Activism in the Burnaby Mountain Protests” 2018), plagiarism (“The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity” 2008), and public beliefs about writing instruction (“Local Examples and Master Narratives: Stanley Fish and the Public Appeal of Current-Traditionalism” 2015). I also write about gender and comic literature (“The Scholarly Transgressions of Constance Rourke” 2017, “Little House on the Tundra: Female Winners of the Leacock Award for Canadian Comedy,” co-authored with Diana Solomon 2023). I am currently completing a monograph about the role of consciousness, intentionality, and rhetorical speech acts in constructing and altering social reality, entitled Mind Over Matter: Consciousness, Rhetoric, and Social Ontology.
Courses
Future courses may be subject to change.