Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing

My current research interests include digital literacies, new media scholarship, electronic publication, information design/information architecture, teaching in digital environments, and technical and professional communication. My dissertation project, situated in the area of digital rhetoric (which I see as a field related to but distinct from computers and writing and professional/technical writing) began the work of develop methodologies for research in digital rhetoric, with applications in professional writing, computer-supported cooperative work, informatics, and composition. One of the key affordances of networked communication is that work can circulate through increasingly widespread knowledge ecologies; the initial object of analysis for the digital methods I am developing is the role of circulation within the rhetorical practices of digital production, using case studies of both published online scholarship and unpublished work that is available online via electronic portfolios.

Biography

I began my career intending to become a high school English teacher, but through exposure to various individuals and communities, I found that I had an abiding interest in the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. I began to pursue questions of how to use computer technologies to support pedagogies when I began my MA work at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, culminating in the completion of a Master's thesis on the topic of hypertextual collaboration as pedagogical process in 1995. Soon after I joined the staff of the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy -- an opportunity which has allowed me to read exciting, often cutting-edge scholarship and to work with exceptional scholars in the field of computers and writing.

In June of 2007 I completed my PhD in Rhetoric and Writing (Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing concentration) at Michigan State University. I am currently finishing my first year of teaching at George Mason University, where I have the privilege to work with exceptionally smart and humane colleagues.

As core faculty in the undergraduate Nonfiction Writing and Rhetoric (NWR) concentration and the graduate Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) concentration, I have been working with the other writing studies faculty on curricular revisions to those concentrations and on the development of a PhD in Public and Institutional Rhetorics.