About
I have been teaching in some capacity at the University of Michigan since 2010. I joined the Sweetland Center for Writing in Fall 2016, and the LSWA faculty a few years later. I am also the co-director of the Dissertation Writing Institute during the Spring. In past lifetimes, I also worked in the university press world (at University of Iowa and University of Michigan), and was a journalist at a rural Iowan newspaper.
I teach a range of courses, and one of my greatest joys is developing a new course based on whatever esoteric interest I am currently obsessed with. I would happily teach on the rhetoric of cereal boxes or “the Netflix edit” or the aesthetic category of “awesomely bad” if Sweetland or LSWA would let me!
Recent classes have included: an upper-level writing class on trash, a multimodal composition class on bugs, a LSWA class on DIY culture and craft, and a series of mini-courses on “the rhetoric of” online advice columns, webcomics, toxic online comment culture, maps, infographics, crowdfunding, etc.
I also regularly deliver workshops oriented towards graduate students about the transition to graduate writing and about time management.
In my spare time, I love to collage. I also enjoy playing D&D, close reading Love is Blind, and researching weird creature facts. I have a particular affinity for any creature that people think is unlovable; my D&D group jokes that if something is horrifying or ugly, I will want to do “nonlethal damage.”
