As an undergrad, I used to think English professors taught courses they loved to passionate students, discussed cutting-edge ideas with fellow scholars over a bottle of red, and wrote books about subjects that made their minds tingle. It sounded like the most delightful and intellectually rewarding of lives, and I dreamt I someday might get to live it. I must say that although my picture was rather rosy, it was—in my case at least—not inaccurate. As an English professor, I get to do all those things. However, there is so much more that happens behind the scenes of academia. Much of it takes the form of some committee—or ten—and that work is not particularly rosy. Committees notwithstanding, I love my academic life, and I’m infinitely grateful to live it.
Below I share a selection of my scholarship. Check out my CV for the completist version.



Books

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Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition

Computers and Composition Digital Press

Winner of the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award

Cámara Retórica is a video book comprised of six video-essay chapters that connect film and video production, feminist filmmaking, and Rhetoric and Composition. It provides a roadmap to those wanting to pick up a camera and experiment, play, and create.

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Pixelating the Self: Digital Feminist Memoirs

Enculturation Intermezzo

Pixelating the Self is an edited collection of multimodal pieces that explore connections between the authors’ personal lives, rhetoric, and scholarly thinking. The collection is a call for more multimodal work in academia, in particular when it comes to examinations of our own lives and the lives of those who have shaped us.

Editorial Work

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constellations: a cultural rhetoric publishing space

 

I am the co-founder and editor-in-chief of constellations, an online double-blind peer review journal featuring cultural rhetorics scholarship, teaching, and practice. The publication encourages non-traditional pieces, particularly those that push boundaries of style, form, content, and media in their composition and presentation.

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agnès films: supporting women and feminist filmmakers

 

I co-founded and was the editor-in-chief of agnès films throughout the publication’s 14 years in print. Named after legendary French filmmaker, Agnès Varda, the online publication featured articles, reviews, and interviews about women-centric and feminist films and TV, providing coverage to up-and-coming and established artists alike.

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Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society

 

I was a founding editor of Present Tense, working as their multimedia editor during the publication’s first four years. Present Tense is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic issues through a rhetorical lens.

 

Refereed Journal Articles

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Motherhood on the Screen: An Exploration of Wounds Opened and Closed Through Home Video

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

Winner of the Kairos Best Webtext Award

 

There is great richness to be found in and between those birthdays and Christmas moments if one takes the time to really pay attention. Like the lives they represent, home videos will surprise us with unexpected moments of pain and happiness.

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Creating our Pasts Together: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Memoir

Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

 

As we become more adept at telling the stories of our past alongside others, we can begin to shift away from the traditional image of someone telling their story in isolation and replace it with one of communal, constellated storytelling.

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Alto Precio: Love, Loss, and Rebellion in Raising Bilingual Children

Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society

 

The thing about immigration is that it always entails loss. If we hide our home culture from our children, they don’t fully understand who we are and where we’re coming from. If we give them only pieces of the culture, they long for what is missing. And yet, we can’t give them the whole culture because we no longer fully belong it ourselves.

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A Feminist Approach to Social Media

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

 

As we crafted our feminist social media presence, we were mindful of the fact that feminism is a multifaceted term that encompasses a complex set of varying—even contradictory—ideologies that sometimes result in feminists arguing with feminists over social media.

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Vanishing Fronteras: A Call for Documentary Filmmaking in Cultural Rhetorics (con la ayuda de Anzaldúa)

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture

 

I never managed to take my camera to Anzaldúa’s doorstep and ask to capture her wild and gorgeous wisdom, but there are many other stories waiting to be told and while some will shine in print, others will unfold better as moving images. Let’s pick up our cameras and bring them to life.

Book Chapters

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Consulting Editor to the Rescue: Seeing Storytelling Anew Through Veteran Eyes

Revising Moves: Sharing and Narrating Revision in Action

University Press of Colorado

Sometimes you live with a story for so long you lose track of where it ends and where you begin. Like in those rare marriages that last numerous decades, the boundaries between two separate entities blur to engender a wondrous hybrid creature. Instead of two people building a life together, however, it’s a person and a story. Human and fact. Human and fiction.

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Family Archives and the Rhetoric of Loss

Provocations: Reconstructing the Archive

Computers and Composition Digital Press

 

 

The archivists in this case are our relatives and friends, and our personal connection to them is the key to accessing the information. There are no rules beyond the complex and capricious give and take of affection.

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Unstoppable Force: Maternal Power and Feminism in the Harry Potter Series and its Film Adaptations

Hermione Granger Saves the World: Essays on the Feminist Heroine of Hogwarts 

McFarland

 

It is important for Hermione to be flawed in some ways because she is the character many of the female—and some of the male—audience aspire to be, and it would be unhealthy and unrealistic for her to be perfect.

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Bare Life, Bridges, and Nodes: Race in the Twilight Saga and its Film Adaptations

Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the Twilight Series

Ashgate 

 

Meyer uses Bella, Renesmee, and Jacob to guide us through the saga’s racial minefield, arguing that racism can be best combated by personally getting to know the Other and developing romantic and blood bonds with people of other metaphorical and literal races.

Invited Journal Articles

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The Mass Exodus: Why People Are Leaving Academia and What We Can Learn from Their Stories

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

Sonia told us she was leaving because staying in a flawed, exploitative system she’d unsuccessfully tried to change was unhealthy and unsustainable. She made a call to those who were staying to stand up to injustice within our departments and beyond.

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Performances and Personas: An Introduction to Issue 6 of constellations

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

Dad wrote about serious (except for a smattering of intellectual puns) quests toward defeating time, death, and other undefeatable things. He published a book, stories, and poems, but none of them set the literary world on fire. They did, however, set my imagination ablaze.

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Migrations, Moves, and Aftermaths: An Introduction to Issue 5 of constellations

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

 

Change, even the happiest, most fairy-taleish version of change, is hard. Change is a kind of loss, and loss hurts and disorients. I am not complaining about having won the academic lottery but, rather, trying to get at how complex and painful moves and migrations are even in the dreamiest of cases.

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Embodying Mentorship and Friendship: A Love Letter to Villanueva’s “Tradition and Change”

Composition Studies

 

Some people who change your life are consistently by your side, holding your hand as you stumble through your story’s most gnarled passages. Some, like spectral mentors in fairy tales, appear only when you need them most.

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A Dance of Joy, Distress, and Tenderness

An Introduction to Our Fourth Issue constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

 

I walked into the kitchen while Billie Holiday was playing, and I suddenly—you could say involuntarily—started to dance. I swayed slightly at first, hoping no one would notice, but it felt so good that I put embarrassment aside and twirled around with abandon.

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A Response to Cushman, Baca, and García’s College English Introduction

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

 

Real human beings with lives and families are affected by the words we write and that those human beings feel wounded when we express ourselves in ways that unkindly portray them or their work.

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Constellating Stories and Counterstories: Cultural Rhetorics Scholarship Principles

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

 

Real human beings with lives and families are affected by the words we write and that those human beings feel wounded when we express ourselves in ways that unkindly portray them or their work.

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What We Did the Year Everything Blew Up: An Introduction to Our Third Issue

constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place

 

Our days, those strange pandemic days that bleed into one another, are crowded with moments of quiet exasperation and minor wonder. I am typing this as my boys bounce between laughing and squabbling in the living room I use as my office, jumping around my precious filming equipment.

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Adventures in Collaborative Documentary Editing Across Continents, or How I Learned to Make Better Movies

Composition Studies

 

We pass the Adobe Premiere version of the film back and forth, with me leaving her extensive notes on our shared Google documents to which she responds using track-change comments. It is an elaborate apparatus that makes up for the fact that we live in different continents but are birthing a project together.

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The Gift of Collaboration: A Roundtable of Agnès Varda

Cléo: a journal of film and feminism

 

As someone who makes a lot of first-person documentaries, I found the balance between Varda’s story and those of the people she encountered to be intricate and inspiring. She pulls off the almost impossible task of having her life and the lives of others blend into a compelling and rich narrative that is at once diverse and cohesive.

Activist Campaigns

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The ERA Is a Hair’s-Breadth Away from Constitutional History in Spite of Mrs. America: An Open Letter to Studios, Networks, Streaming Services, and the Creative Community

agnès films: supporting women and feminist filmmakers

 

We want to continue to believe that Hollywood and the news media can be leaders in social justice and freedom of expression, and our creative community will not rest until equal means equal.

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Cross Post: Parents in the Palais: An Open Letter to the 70th Cannes Film Festival

agnès films: supporting women and feminist filmmakers

 

This isn’t only about Cannes but about film festivals around the world waking up to this issue. If we want more women making films, we also need to accept that many of them may need to bring their children with them to film festivals.

NCTE Position Statements

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Statement on Editorial Ethics

National Council of Teachers of English

 

It is only through intentional measures to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion that our field may make space for new or underrepresented disciplinary perspectives, for transformative conversations, and for innovative research and practices.

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Position Statement on Citation Justice in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies

National Council of Teachers of English

 

Citation justice, like all efforts toward racial justice, is challenging and demands time, reflexivity, an openness to learning from one another, and patience with ourselves.