My research and teaching interests include histories and theories of rhetoric, digital rhetorics, and the intersections between rhetoric and philosophy. In my most current research, I am interested in how rhetoricians’ conceptions and refusals of the nonhuman (from animals and things to technologies and natural phenomena) have informed understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to the present. Although rhetoric is often defined in terms of language—and thus bound closely to the agencies of human speakers and writers—my work examines the unheralded roles nonhuman beings have played in establishing an understanding of rhetoric as specific to “the human barnyard,” as Kenneth Burke says.
