Research

I am a speech scholar understands music and noise as essential forces for social transformation. Throughout my career, I have studied the synchronous exchange of affective energy from many directions. My research is currently focused at rhetoric’s intersection with disability studies and sound studies.

Early in my career, I worked as a research assistant in the University of Minnesota’s psychoacoustics laboratory with the late Neal F. Viemeister, studying the sensory mechanisms responsible for the detection of beats in tone clusters: a phenomenon likely responsible for the perception of harmonic consonance and dissonance in music. In my years in the lab, I discovered that my interest in hearing was driven by inquiries about the political, aesthetic, and affective dimensions that guided our investigations. (If only I had known about STS at that time!)

Before attending graduate school, I participated in a public history research project on the intergenerational music scene in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood at the edge of the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus. With long-time collaborator Jodi Larson (Museums Unbound), I produced an oral history radio documentary and an interactive museum installation (both titled Music on the Edge) that featured the recorded voices of community artists.

As an MA student at Indian University, I studied the mythologized connections between race and aurality in early-twentieth-century US culture. I presented papers on the monstrosity of noise in Ralph Ellison’s writing as well as the mythopoiesis of Malcolm X’s oratory.

My dissertation research investigated speech acts that exceed normative understandings of decorum and self-control. In particular, this project focused on cases in which the “excesses” reveal ableist and racially encoded entailments of many key concepts from rhetorical theory including decorum, kairos, agency, eloquence, and voice.