About

Biography

tl,dr:

I’m an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Washington State University. I grew up near Washington DC, spent some time in the Army, and am now a sober single dad. I like cats.

extended dance mix:

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I grew up with librarians’ books and an Atari 800. When I was younger I brushed up against COBOL and Fortran and BASIC and Pascal and Lisp. I joined the Army and drove trucks and figured out I could get things done. I competed for teaching assistant funding as a graduate student and found myself in front of a composition classroom. I learned Latin well enough to read Cicero but not well enough to read Tacitus. I figured out I was a feminist but wasn’t very good at it, and am still trying to improve. I wrote a dissertation about digital technology and economic inequality. I got a starter academic job and deployed to OEF and helped the Afghans rebuild their systems of higher education, including promoting education for Afghan women. I got involved with veterans’ initiatives and then with intellectual property initiatives in my professional organization. I realized that I kept coming back to issues of economic inequality, and pursued the economic angle. And I came back again to technology and questions of incommensurability. Today, I’m a sober single dad in the Aspie part of the spectrum, working on the usual masculinity and self-doubt issues. I read poetry and cook stews and pet the cats with my son Malcolm. Sometimes I build databases or write stories, knowing those activities are isomorphic.

on unreliable narrators:

My preferred personal prose style is prolix and pedantic, pleonastic and obscure—I’ll seldom use a single phrase when three paragraphs will suffice—and I confess to sometimes enjoying amplifying that tendency into over-the-top narcissist-academic self-parody. Given that it’s on the Internet and coming from me, some of the information and opinions here may not be entirely reliable or true. The domain name suggests astute readers may identify a number of unattributed references hic et passim.

Research and Teaching

My work in publications, presentations, projects, and classrooms investigates how economic frameworks and digital technologies shape writing processes, rhetorical practices, pedagogical methods, and institutional structures. I build my research and teaching on four principles:

  1. Writing is a technology.
  2. Technologies replace labor with capital.
  3. Replacing labor with capital is an economic act.
  4. The economic appropriation of writing’s value bears investigation.

Perhaps there should be something here about a theory of technology, but I feel that topic’s best treated more thoroughly in links from the Teaching, Presentations, and Scholarship pages.

Contact

For inquiries about research, teaching, workshops, technologies, or speaking engagements, please visit my contact page.