Hello, all!  I am a teaching assistant professor of communication studies and assistant director of debate. For the past several years, my academic interests have been what could be best described as “eclectic.” I’ve decided to create this blog to share what I’ve been reading academically recently and to hopefully make some order out of chaos. I have two main projects that I plan to blog on this page:

First, I’m an Audible subscriber. I listen to a variety of fiction and nonfiction. I’d like to try to blog about at least one Audible book per week and what I learned from it. Some of these books will be academic and some won’t. It just depends. I will tag these entries as #101AudibleBooks. Whether I’ll ever get to 101 entries, I don’t know.

My second project, which will become a focus in Summer 2021, is to read scholarly work about race in communication studies. The discussions on the Communication Scholars for Transformation Page over the last two years plus the #RhetoricSoWhite critique of rhetorical scholarship has led me to recognize that my own knowledge of the communication studies discipline is overwhelmingly white. My doctoral comprehensive exam reading list (from Fall 2008) had only two essays/books by scholars of color on it — one by Leroy Dorsey and one by Kirt Wilson. My reading list for primary texts in U.S. Public Address did have several speeches by black orators, but I don’t think that’s sufficient, especially since I no longer identify with the Public Address tradition of communication studies. Clearly, I need to do better. I plan to post a reading list at some point will work through that this summer. I plan to take these as #ReadingRace