I’m an associate professor of Communication Arts & Sciences and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State. My interdisciplinary scholarship bridges rhetoric, archives, and gender and sexuality studies.

My first book, Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education, is a queer history of instruction in epistolary rhetoric (University of South Carolina Press, 2019). A second book, The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers, is forthcoming with the Ohio State University Press’s Intersectional Rhetorics series.

Most recently, Steph Ceraso and I co-authored “Ticking Clocks: Rhetorics of Tenure and (In)Fertility” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, December 2023). Initiating a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. this essay examines patterns of discourse that exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously.

In 2021 my work was recognized with the National Communication Association’s Randy Majors Award for outstanding LGBTQ scholarship. Currently I am beginning a new project that charts queer trails through Rachel Carson’s letters, archives, and memorials.