Welcome to my website! I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell where I teach courses in the Journalism and Professional Writing concentration. 

The goal of my scholarship is to initiate critical dialogue about issues of social justice, particularly reproductive justice. As a rhetorician and advocate of feminism, I seek to intervene in representations that (re)construct ideologies of domination (e.g., sexism, racism, ageism, etc.). I also enjoy learning from the rhetorical tactics people use to resist oppression.

My first book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother (2017), challenges the pathologizing discourses of teenage pregnancy and investigates the creative strategies some young mothering women use to resist negative representations of their lives. My second book, Stop Saying Snip! The Rhetoric of Vasectomy (2026), intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility. Specifically, I explore why more men in the U.S. do not get vasectomies. I argue that something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Drawing from my feminist rhetorical study of 37 television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with 17 people who have experienced vasectomy, I surface barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out-of-mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process.