Research

Interests and Projects

Research Interests: 

Media effects, print culture, queer theory, disability, romance novels, visual culture, and autistic self-representation in media.

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Ongoing Work: Cultural production of historical romance novel covers, gendering of public spaces through product placement in stores, assessment of social media platform features for user management and democratic participation online, generational factors the grief process through analysis of Reddit posts, how queer historical romances change genre definitions and  the understood social function of these novels, and proposing a new methodological approach for genre critique to engage with and account for the myriad context of culture/power that intersect in texts. 

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Looking to the Future: There is a whole slew of work to be done in regards to romance novels from a rhetorical perspective and examining why the only scholarship surrounding them is a morality debate, so future research may focus heavily on different aspects of romance novel production and reception among audiences.

Even more broadly, little work has been done to examine romance media outside of the context of the novel and future work aims to aid in shifting scholarly focus there through the lenses of cross-cultural and intercultural communication. 

Eventually I also hope to explore autistic self-representation in the media and how it is used in their identity, community, and world making.