Creative work.
I am an emerging creative writer in literary fiction and nonfiction. You can find examples of my creative nonfiction work in the online anthology Reflections of the Land: Meditations on Environment and Industry (reprinted with permission in The Land), Multiplicity, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Augustana magazine. I am currently working on my first novel, a romantic tragicomedy titled Decision Theory about overeducated people falling in love.
Scholarly work.
My scholarly work focuses on two areas. The first is the politics of place: how place, memory, and identity intersect in our politics and how urban planning practices reflect and shape our ideas about citizenship. This is the subject of my book Building the Body Politic (an account of urban planning in Washington, DC) and articles published in Theory & Event, Polity, and Political Research Quarterly, as well as numerous conference presentations. My work on the politics of place has led to interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post.
I also write about politics in popular culture, particularly media representations of gender and the ways in which activists use media to disrupt normative gender politics. My work in this area has appeared in Gender & Politics, Polity, and in the edited collection Gender and Political Communication in America (with Dr. Stephen Klien).
I am currently working with anthropologist Dr. Adam Kaul on Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest, a book-length project examining cultural heritage, tourism, and wind energy in Bishop Hill, Illinois.
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