Scholarship

RESEARCH AGENDA

American Food Politics, Ethics, and Practices

of the 20th and 21st Century

Three areas within the larger field of Food Studies interest me: the political connections between government, industry, and individuals that influence food choices; the ethical questions posed by food, specifically regarding its production, consumption, and distribution; and the ways food practices are influenced by factors such as race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, education, and community structures.

I am particularly interested in how both public and private institutions shape nutritional discourses, and how these discourses influence the way people purchase food for themselves and others. I wonder about the wildly varied rhetoric of health and the consequent public confusion regarding nutrition.

The foundation of my inquiry is to discover how culture (in its restrictive and resistant forms) is transmitted through nutritional/food discourses as well as material consumption. Scholars frequently speak of the way ideology is embodied in culture; my goal is to study the impact of culture on people’s actual bodies and the health of those bodies. Food is that rare literal embodiment of ideology.

Gender and Sexuality

in American Popular Culture

Popular culture has the potential to both sustain and subvert current constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In particular, I am interested in studying popular genres such as horror, romance, western, or mystery and what cultural work these genres do in terms of gender and sexuality.

I am interested in how language works to shape cultural hierarchies and in how certain groups are oppressed through either absence or negative presence in literature, television, film, or the Internet. Genre studies and literary theory will play a crucial role in this field. The choice of language does significant cultural work, and so does the choice of genre and the ways we define (place boundaries on) genres.

I am most interested in questions of identity: how do Americans construct and engage with difference? How have different genres and different media engaged in conversations about gender and sexuality?

Writing Centers as a

Site for Social Justice

Writing Centers, perhaps more than any other learning support service, have the potential to significantly alter the course of a student's life. Several areas within the larger field of Writing Center Scholarship interest me: linguistic diversity, especially the multiplicity of English, as a tool for disrupting narratives about "proper" English; the retention and completion of at-risk student populations; and organizational structures of learning centers within a college or university setting.

I am also increasingly interested in the ways that tutor training can either encourage or inhibit hesitant writers, writers of non-privileged dialects, or at-risk writers. In particular, I wonder how the professionalization of peer tutors impacts their ability to establish meaningful peer relationships with student tutees.