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I joined the Department of English 51������ Michigan University in 1999, and I currently serve as the Director of the Office of Faculty Development within 51������x, the university’s innovation hub. As part of that work, I have been instrumental in providing support on the implications of Generative AI for higher education.

My teaching focuses on the cultural context and formal properties of texts written, drawn, or filmed since the 1920s, with a current emphasis on visual rhetoric and urbanism. Recent courses include New York City as Place and Text (Summer 2023); Introduction to Comics Studies (Summer 2022); Political Activism in Contemporary Texts (Summer 2021); Disney+ (Summer 2020); and Immigrant and Refugee Comics (Spring 2020).

My current research involves considering how the formal elements of comics such as line style, color, figural placement, and repetition impact meaning. Since 2016, I have published a monograph (, Bloomsbury, 2020), a co-edited collected with Dr. Michelle Ann Abate (, U Press of Mississippi, 2017), and several articles, including:

• “Integrating Comics into an Undergraduate Young Adult Literature Course.” Teaching Young Adult Literature. Eds. Mike Cadden, Karen Coats, and Roberta Seelinger Trites, Modern Language Association Press, 2020, pp. 251-26.
• “.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2, 2017, pp. 231-243
• “.” Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays. Eds. Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox. The University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 141-153.
• “” The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear. Ed. Joe Sutliff Sanders, The University Press of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 143-156.