Specialization: Rhetoric, Place, and Space; Public Memory
I explore the meanings of places, both physical and imagined, as they are rhetorically constructed and interpreted by those who experience them. As a result, I employ both rhetorical and qualitative methods of inquiry. In Popular Stories and Promised Lands, I examined how narratives found in film, television, comic strips, and magazines construct imagined places in which fan communities gathered. In Huskerville, I illustrated how geography, history, and college football converge in fans’ cultural enactment of being a Nebraskan. In Upon the Ruins of Liberty, I outlined how competing memories intersected within the advocacy, design, excavation, and building of the President’s House public memory installation in Independence National Historical Park.
I have continued to explore the relationships among memories and places in three recent books: Childhood Memory Spaces (Peter Lang); and a pair of edited volumes, U.S. Public Memory, Rhetoric, Nationhood, and the National Mall (Lexington) and Haunting Public Memories, Rhetoric, and the U.S. National Mall (Lexington).
My current work, under the auspices of the Charles E. Zumkehr Professorship, can be found here: https://www.ohio.edu/scripps-college/faculty-staff/zumkehr-projects