I am an Associate Professor of Communication and English at Mount St. Mary's University. I earned a PhD in English from Arizona State University, with a focus in the history and theory of rhetoric. I am currently President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric.
I was awarded a 2017 International Society for the History of Rhetoric Research Fellowship, which supports my current book project , A Probable Logic: Emotion, Sensation, and Persuasion in Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic. This study argues that the fundamental change in the rhetorical and poetic theories of the 12th and 13th centuries is an increased emphasis on probability and verisimilitude, achieved through appeals to less-rational modes of reasoning such as sensation, emotion, and authority. In this project, I expand on my past work to better understand the place of these and other modes of non-rational reasoning and appeal in the poetic and rhetorical doctrines of the 12th and 13th centuries. Drawing from artes poetriae, epic poems, Scholastic philosophy, commentaries on works of logical and rhetorical theory, and other texts, this project argues that rhetoric was increasingly positioned as a counterpart to dialectic that rationalized and imposed order upon less-than-rational forms of persuasion and reasoning.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetorica, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Intermezzo, Community Literacy Journal, and others.
You can find me tweeting about medieval bees and Dungeons and Dragons on Twitter. And sometimes publishing about D&D too.