Research Overview
Crucial to my research are concerns about the relationship between rhetoric and human rights. My recent doctoral dissertation (2014), Rhetoric in the Time of Torture, now a book project, analyzes the rhetoric of torture in contemporary U.S. contexts. The project contends with the fraught position of torture in civic discourse by charting a rhetorical history of torture from the Bush era up to the present, using several archives from the past decade: the Torture Memos, the Abu Ghraib photographs, and the Web sites of several humanitarian aid organizations. I am presently at work on several pieces that extend the ideas of my dissertation project, including one theorizing the role of rhetoric in “making” the world following human-rights abuses and other crises. I have recent work in Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience Perception, and Display; Trace: A Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology; and Interdisciplinary Humanities. My work has also appeared in the journal Present Tense; Re/Framing Identifications, edited by Michelle Ballif and published by Waveland Press; the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative blog carnival on feminist materialisms; the inaugural issue of the Journal of Contemporary Poetics, published by International Islamic University, in Islamabad, Pakistan; among other venues. I have also published entries for several textbook Instructor Manuals, including Arguing About Literature and Making Literature Matter (eds. John Schilb and John Clifford). I present regularly at national conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communications (CCCC) and Rhetoric Society of America's biennial conference (RSA). At the 2012 and 2015 CCCCs, I published session reviews in Kairos (2012 and 2015). |