Research Interests

• Literacy & Its Limits

I’m interested in how we become literate (reading the world), why we become literate (for which purposes), how we enact literacy (communicate with the world), and the ways that literacy changes us (marks us in the world as a particular type or person).

• Argumentation/ Persuasion & Classic Modes of Rhetoric

I find the classic, rhetorical methods of argumentation and persuasion to be of timeless use and interest. The ways in which we enact Ethos, Pathos, and Logos as well as the ways that understand indicative and deductive reasoning are of upmost importance if logic and reasoning are to be appreciated fully. What’s more, classic mode of rhetoric weren’t just used to understand one’s opponent (literal or rhetorical) but it was used to “know thyself”— a task that is essential to literacy: self-literacy.

• Visual & Meta-Visual Literacy

I’m fascinated by the continued rise of and reliance on the image culture. Ancient culture taught us not to focus on the images and to come out of the cave, and yet individuals now are even more connected to images and imagery (on TVs, phones, and in advertisements). Thus, visual literacy, mere observation and analysis of images, is good, but meta-visual literacy, which seeks to understand and analyze the effects the Age of the Image (Stephen Apkon) has upon a culture and its people, is in my estimation more important. For meta-visual literacy is an analysis of the image and the consumer of the image. After all, Oliver Wendell Holmes called the image the “mirror with a memory,” and in 1859 predicted that the “image would become more important than the object itself and would in fact make the object disposable.”

• Hero-Myth

Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth told of the universality of heroes and their various journeys. Today, heroes are just as prevalent (e.g. comic book characters, the return of Westerns, and the rise of the heroine). Why do we crave a hero? Is it our desire to be saved, or is our desire for a people of unusual character and strength to serve as a benchmark for our own character and strength? I find questions like these answered in the analysis of timeless story-myth.

• Literary Praxis

I am always concerned with the current modes and methods of theory, praxis, and the juxtaposition of the two. As such, I find emerging technologies, cultural crossroads, and socio-economic environments crucial when developing the curriculum for a writing classroom.