I am currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University.  I received my PhD  in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program (Department of Communication Studies) at Northwestern University in August 2012. 

My research focuses on concepts in public discourse that produce national identity and political action, focusing particularly on Turkey and the Middle East.  I recently published Figures That Speak: The Vocabulary of Turkish Nationalism (Syracuse University Press, 2022) which analyzes the main concepts that shape political and historical understanding in Turkey.  The project utilizes research gathered during fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey in 2009-2010 and 2016, and has been funded through fellowships and grants from the Institute for Turkish Studies, the Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy at Willamette University, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and Northwestern University.

My other research areas include the relationship between communication and cultural difference, the limits of representation, and human rights theory.  I have authored essays on conceptual history, public memory, and anti-colonial rhetorical methods that have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Departures in Critical Qualitative Inquiry, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication, as well as Reframing Rhetorical History: Cases, Theories and Methodologies, ed. Kathleen J. Turner and Jason Edward Black (University of Alabama Press, 2022).  My undergraduate teaching experience includes Rhetorical Criticism, Rhetorical Theory, Visual Rhetoric, National Identity, Human Rights, Post-Modernity, Social Movements, and Populism.  My graduate teaching experience includes Rhetorical Criticism, Rhetorical Theory, Narrative, Postcolonial Theory, and Historiography. 

This site is being reconsidered.  For access to my published essays and selected syllabi, see my Academia.edu page.  For access to my CV, see my Ohio University faculty page.  For access to information on “The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual,” see Jeffrey J. Williams’s essay on the Chronicle of Higher Education.