I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota in 2008. And I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.
Research & Teaching
My work involves the intersection of visual culture, science and technology studies, and rhetorical studies with a focus on visual representations and technological imaginings of the biomedical body as well as the social and cultural practices involved in seeing that body.
Through ethnographic, historical, and cultural studies research, my work seeks to expand conventional notions of how embodied subjects use visual images and technological objects to construct social phenomena and ways of being in the world.
Current Book Project: Visuality in the Flesh: Making the Body of Gross Anatomy
A phenomenological ethnography of the visual culture and embodied practices of the gross anaotmy lab, Visuality in the Flesh explores how bodies and representations articulate one another and the consequences images and bodies, living and dead, can have on the people who work with them.
Specifically I uncover how social practices of vision—looking, seeing, and recognizing—are enacted through embodied experiences of touch, movement, and physical manipulation. These embodied activities of looking, touching, and making, which I term anatomical visuality, are constituted by the representations, objects, knowledge systems, and practices of the lab that make possible not only medical knowledge but also the anatomical body, a conceptual body formed from anatomical discourse and human flesh, a body that precedes the patient body of clinical medicine. That is, anatomical visuality constructs the anatomical body—one that is simultaneously subject and object, discourse and matter, experiential medium and inscribed surface, biography and biology.
Drawing from Merleau-Ponty's notions of embodiment and flesh and Bourdieu's concept of habitus, my project explicates how this biomedical body is enacted through practice and how this making affects the participants of the lab; in the process, I develop a theory of intercorporeal visuality relevant to other biomedical, scientific, and laboratory settings.
