I (he/him) am an assistant professor in the Communication Studies department in the Rhetorical Studies area at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My research program is about how rhetoric shapes public perceptions about secrecy, transparency, and artificial intelligence in American public culture.

My first academic monograph (forthcoming with Ohio State University Press) is titled Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric. This book offers a critique of transparency as a self-evident ideal. The chapters offer a rhetorical history and readings strategy for secrecy that draws upon critical frameworks like psychoanalysis, genealogy, and deconstruction, with individual chapters that explore how presidential scandals, dogwhistles, national security leaks, and settler-detective fiction conjure a public spectacle of secrecy and transparency.

You can find an abridged 2024 CV here.

Please reach out if you have inquiries about research, teaching, or wish to set up consultations.

I primarily teach undergraduate and graduate-level courses in rhetorical theory and topics courses on the secrecy, surveillance, and algorithmic culture. I am grateful to the University of Minnesota Libraries for their support of my open-access textbook (Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power), developed during the early COVID-19 pandemic for flipped learning and online (synchronous/asynchronous) delivery. Other teaching resources can be found at my newsletter site (The Rhetoric UnTextbook), which contains materials on the rhetoric of secrecy and surveillance and primers for my graduate-level rhetorical theory course.