I am a Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where I am affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD. My academic work asks questions related to writing, digital culture, and technology.
A significant part of my work focuses on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. I have been involved with Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects since 2011, both as a researcher and educator. I teach with Wikipedia, lead workshops and professional development for educators, and work with academic and Wikimedia communities to expand participation in the encyclopedia. Together with Jen Johnson, I am co-chair of the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative, which works to strengthen connections between rhetoric and writing studies and Wikimedia projects. My scholarship examines Wikipedia not simply as an encyclopedia, but as a social, technological, and knowledge infrastructure. My book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, co-authored with Zachary McDowell, explores the rhetorical and epistemological dimensions of Wikipedia.
I am also deeply involved in open education. I am a managing co-editor of Writing Spaces, an open-access textbook project that provides freely available resources for teachers and students of college writing. More broadly, I work on questions of how academic knowledge can be made more accessible, participatory, and equitable. This work connects my interests in open educational resources, Wikipedia, public scholarship, and the broader infrastructure through which knowledge circulates.
More recently, much of my research has turned toward generative AI and writing. I study how technologies such as ChatGPT are changing writing practices, writing pedagogy, authorship, creativity, and ideas about academic integrity. Rather than treating AI primarily as a tool to be adopted or prohibited, I am interested in the larger social and rhetorical questions it raises: How does AI change the writing process? What happens to students’ relationships with teachers and institutions? How do we understand authorship when writing becomes increasingly collaborative with machines? And how might we design writing pedagogy that preserves human agency and learning in an AI-saturated environment?
I also work on research projects that bring together academic and Wikimedia communities. This includes studying how scholars and funders engage with Wikimedia, developing ways to understand the impact of academic contributions to Wikimedia projects, and examining the relationships among Wikipedia, artificial intelligence, and the commercial knowledge infrastructures built around open web content.
Across these projects, I keep returning to a common set of questions: Who gets to produce knowledge? How do technologies shape what becomes visible, credible, and valuable? What happens when open knowledge becomes part of larger technological and commercial systems? And how can writers, teachers, researchers, and communities intervene in those systems rather than simply adapting to them?
At heart, I am a teacher and scholar of writing who happens to be fascinated by what happens when writing meets technology. My work moves between the classroom, the scholarly community, and the open web because I see those spaces as deeply connected. Writing is never just about producing text. It is also about participating in communities, making knowledge, and shaping the systems through which that knowledge moves.