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I study writing.

That’s the easy version. I’d also say I I study how symbolic forms shape the minds and communities that encounter them.

Which means I study how people think and learn, how people work together, how people change their ideas over time, and how societies shape and retain memories and convey culture to others. I do this through studying editing: what editors actually do when they intervene in a text, what is gained and lost when that function is degraded or automated, and what it means for a culture to have people who do that work well. I also study the cognitive technologies of literacy: how writing, editing, and coding don't just express thought but restructure it. And I ask how texts move through institutions — who decides what enters the public record, in what form, legible to whom.

I've pursued these questions across two decades of professional editorial work at university and commercial presses, through archival research in material and digital collections, through computational modeling of editorial cognition, and through training in digital humanities and textual studies. My academic background spans English literature (MA), creative writing (MFA), and rhetoric and composition (PhD), with additional training in digital scholarly editing and text encoding at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

My active research projects include:

• Editing Culture - My book manuscript (under review with UMass Press) argues that editing is among the most consequential and least theorized cultural functions, as a threshold practice where the writer's private cognitive work meets the public symbolic record. I draw on rhetorical theory, book history, and the sociology of knowledge to investigate what editing does to texts, writers, readers, and public imagination; what we stand to lose as the practice is automated and eliminated; and how we can act in small ways to perpetuate what’s worthwhile.

• Virtual Editor - I've built AI-powered systems trained on editorial theory to model the judgment of a professional developmental editor. Beyond their use as tools, I treat them as research instruments: what does computational modeling of editorial cognition reveal about what editing actually is? I'm currently developing this into a collaborative EEG study of neural dynamics in human-AI editorial interaction.

• Edits on the Record - A grant-funded open-access documentary project in which my team and I edit and publish a book manuscript while making the entire editorial process visible — every intervention, negotiation, and revision — for scholars, students, and practitioners to study.

• Coding Across the Curriculum - A collaborative project investigating coding as a cognitive technology: how programming languages, like writing systems, shape the knowledge they're used to produce. This work connects to my participation in the ITiCSE 2026 Working Group on Epistemic Programming.

I am Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Virginia, where I also direct Writing Across the Curriculum, and Publisher and Senior Editor at Road Trip Press. In 2026–27 I will be based in Jyväskylä, Finland, where I am building research collaborations with European colleagues in book history, digital humanities, and computing education.