Welcome to my professional home on the web!  In this space, I post things that tickle my “intellectual fancy” as an educator and a scholar.  I also post my own educational resources, including sample syllabi and assignments from courses I teach, information about the research I am conducting, and some experimental teacher resources (in progress!).

I am an Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina–Beaufort. At USCB, I direct the writing center and am building a writing program. I love helping students write more effectively, and I’m especially interested in helping our students transition more successfully into college and helping them develop as writers.

I completed my PhD in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan in August of 2015, after finishing my dissertation, “Linguistic and Rhetorical Ideologies in the Transition to College Writing: A Case Study of Southern Students.” If you’re interested in how the ideologies around Southern American English influence rural Southern students’ experiences in college writing classes, I’d love for you to take a look. It’s available here in PDF form. I welcome conversation about this work, and I look forward to continuing to work with and think about the needs of this specific student population.

I’m really interested in helping students leverage their local knowledge in the context of the college writing classroom–how can they use their community-based resources and rhetorics to acquire academic writing skills?  At the moment, I’m investigating this question in the context of rural Southern schools and the resources of non-standard speech communities, but I look forward to broadening my scope to include other kinds of local knowledge, discourses, and rhetorics.  I’m also passionate about “bridging the divide” between K-12 ELA classrooms and post-secondary writing classrooms

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about using digital rhetorics and tools to teach students writing and thinking skills they can transfer into a wide range of contexts.

When I’m not working, you’ll likely find me experimenting in my kitchen–I love feeding a crowd!  I also enjoy tutoring local middle and high school students, reading young adult novels, doing crafty things, and participating in community theatre.