I’m a Professor of English, Education,  and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, specializing in rhetoric and writing. I also serve as a program affiliate to the Joint PhD Program in English and Education.

I love teaching. I offer a variety of courses in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies, and I enjoy working with students at all levels, from first-year students writing their first college essays to PhD candidates writing their dissertations. Recent undergrad offerings include Literacy in a Digital Age, Writing for the Real World, Dangerous Women: Activism in the Progressive Era, and Feminist Activism since the Sixties; grad offerings include What Is Writing For, Researching and Teaching Digital Literacies, and Writing to Save the World.

I try to make my courses hands-on through student-led discussions and in-class workshops. I also try to help students produce writing they would be proud sharing with an audience outside of class. In Magazine Writing, students publish an online magazine, The Mich, and in my women’s rhetoric courses, students have applied feminist principles to editing Wikipedia, a powerful yet gendered knowledge-making space.

My scholarly interests include the history of rhetoric, feminist rhetorics, writing pedagogy, and digital rhetorics, and I am particularly interested in the experiences of non-elite populations of students, the voices of marginalized rhetors, and the means by which ordinary citizens use language to effect change. My work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Peitho, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and elsewhere, and I have written, coauthored, or coedited four volumes: Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947 (2008) recipient of the CCCC Outstanding Book Award; the collection Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak (2013, with Catherine Hobbs); Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884-1945 (2014, with Catherine Hobbs); and the collection Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor (2019, with Jessica Enoch).

I am currently studying Black women’s rhetorical activism in the age of Jim Crow, with recent work in on African American suffrage rhetorics in the Crisis (RSQ) and Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson’s WWI-era civic pedagogy (Rhetoric Review).

I am also interested in how technologies of literacy affect research and writing practices: this work includes a coedited a special issue of College English on integrating digital humanities and historiography and two essays coauthored with UM PhD students: “Going Public in an Age of Digital Digital Anxiety” in Composition Forum examines the rhetorical challenges students experience in online writing, and “Who’s Afraid of Facebook?” in College Composition and Communication is a large-scale survey of students’ online writing practices (see an op/ed preview here).

Outside of academia, my interests include food, music, and the outdoors, and I enjoy exploring all of these in Ann Arbor and around Michigan with family and friends. See some of my Michigan Faves here.