I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota, with a focus in rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science, visual cultural studies, and queer studies.
Research & Teaching
My research and teaching occupy the space where writing studies (particularly rhetoric), visual cultural studies, and science and technology studies overlap. My research specifically investigates how visual texts, as material instantiations of knowledge, social practices, and ideological investments, are used to make evidentiary claims, bear witness to some external reality, structure human experience, and shape the way we know the world.
My teaching interests include visual culture, rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science, queer studies, scientific communication, and new media.
Book Project
My current project is a book proposal based on my dissertation – “A Matter of Perception”: Rhetoric, Embodiment, and the Visual Practices of Anatomy – an ethnographic study of human anatomy education, focusing specifically on cadaveric dissection as a means of enacting, representing, and communicating anatomical discourse. Through direct observations of laboratory classes, in-depth participant interviews, and rhetorical analysis of both visual and verbal texts, I investigate how anatomy education incorporates and is facilitated through visual representations of the body.
Specifically, I argue that anatomical discourse is discernable in and on the body – in the form of terms, structures, and spatial planes and orientations – through the visual and embodied practices of dissection, observation, and demonstration. In turn, students and teachers use these texts and practices to map this information onto the various bodies in the lab, thus reading the human body (both the cadavers’ and their own) as a biological object, an archive of medical knowledge, and a materialization of discourse. Yet to learn anatomy, one must experience the body (including their own) as both subject and object, thus appreciating the necessary and unresolved tension between the body-as-science and the body-as-person.
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