____the online vita is here____

Like a number of my friends, I left for my undergraduate education at The George Washington University thinking that I was destined to become a lawyer. As a high school debater, I was introduced to the discipline of Communication Studies, and when I arrived at GWU, I declared a major early. During my second year, however, I had the fortune to study the history of philosophy with Andrew Altman, and as a result I soon declared a second major in philosophy, jettisoning the dream of a six-figured income in favor of graduate work in philosophy. Nearing the end of my education, however, my Communication Studies advisor, Kerry Riley, introduced me to Rhetorical Studies in a series of independent studies. Rhetorical studies seemed like applied philosophy to me, and so my senior year I decided to pursue graduate work in this area—particularly in rhetoric and popular music.

At Kerry's behest, I chose graduate schools based on a scholar I would like to work with. I applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, primarily to work with Lawrence Grossberg; the University of Texas at Austin, primarily to work with Roderick Hart; and the University of Minnesota, primarily to work with Robert Lee Scott. Based on admission, funding, and health-care options, I began my graduate career at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in the fall of 1996, and emerged with both a MA and Ph.D. in 2002. Along with my advisor R.L. Scott, I worked and studied with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Ronald Walter Greene, Ed Schiappa, Mary Vavrus, and Kirt Wilson.

My early research interests during my graduate study centered on the relation between rhetoric and popular music. These interests led me to take a number of courses in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature department with Robin Brown, John Mowitt and Gary Thomas. My 1998 Master's Thesis, "The Rhetoric of Gothic Subculture," is a semiotic analysis of the discourse and style of "goth." This research led to three, peer review publications on gothic subculture, as well as to a theory of genre and form ("talking about the ineffable") that is central to my current research.

In 1999, the media coverage of the mass murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado had a significant impact on my research interests. Media representations of the young men who killed their classmates—and themselves—were characteristically "occult" in the sense that the hidden cause for the murders ran the gamut from devil worship to drug use. I realized then that there is a very deep, US obsession and repression of the "occult" idiom, understood broadly as "secret knowledge." This widespread, popular fascination with secrets leads many of us to fantasize about what those secrets might be. My dissertation, "Rhetorics of Darkness: Modern Occultism and the Popular Imaginary," examined the idiom of the occult in a number of ways, in relation to class divisions especially. I regret that many people assume that my work on the occult concerns the study of devil worshippers—which is really not what I'm up to. Rather, as a number of publications from this research have demonstrated, the occult or occultic is a principal mechanism of social discrimination, of determining who is Other, simultaneously threatening and beckoning, and who is "like me" or "like us" (just "other"). In this respect, for example, my research examines the use of complex jargon by academics as an occultic practice. Folks too easily point their fingers at the Freemasons, not realizing that they do it too. This esearch was supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. I defended my dissertation in February 2002. In August of that year, I began a tenure-track position in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where I taught for three years. I joined the Communication Studies faculty at the University of Texas in Austin in the fall of 2005 .

I am a scholar in the interdisciplinary field of "Communication Studies," and my specialization is officially "Rhetorical Studies." Of course, as is the case with many academic fields, there is much disagreement about this titular term "rhetoric." In ancient Greece rhetoric was largely understood as persuasive speaking and writing; this view has changed dramatically. In general, I think rhetoric can be defined as the study of how signs and symbols influence people to do things that they would not otherwise ordinarily do, and often in ways that are largely unconscious.

As I noted, my early research focused on the relationships between rhetoric, music, and musical subcultures. My first publication, "Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre," is derived from my MA thesis. This 1998 Popular Music & Society essay ruminates on musical genre as a series of adjectival codes. I extended and complicated these observations later in "Marilyn Manson is Not Goth: Memorial Struggle and the Rhetoric of Subcultural Identity" in the Journal of Communication Inquiry (1999). Central to my early work in popular music and subcultural style is the notion of the ineffable: musical experience is best communicated and described in/with/by means of music. When we shift to the linguistic mode of communication, we always fail to capture the intensity of musical experience in translation. I am currently working a manuscript with my colleague and friend, Mirko M. Hall, on the relationship between rhetoric (or the Symbolic) and the invocatory drive in respect to dance music.

My interest in the incommunicable experience eventually led me to the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. With the help of the work of these theorists, David E. Beard and I have explored apocalyptic discourse as a response to the ineffability of this or that "postmodern" crisis in two, Southern Communication Journal articles: "On the Apocalyptic Sublime" in 2000, and its follow-up, "On the Apocalyptic Columbine" in 2003. As a result of this work, David and I discovered and wrote about the thought of the French theorist Paul Virilio, whom I would describe as a Christian media ecologist obsessed with traumatic catastrophe.

By taking up the literature in our field on apocalyptic discourse, I eventually realized that I'm "fundamentally" interested in the relationship between rhetoric and religion. More broadly, as I began my dissertation research, I defined my pursuit as an exploration of "theological form." For me, theological form refers to recurrent cultural patterns of transcendence located in writing and speaking. "Transcendence" is the idea of "moving across or through," as opposed to "immanence," which means "inside" or "in the here and now." Secular thought is often characterized as "immanent," and religious thought is often described as "transcendent."

My dissertation research focused on transcendent themes, and particularly, on the rhetoric of secrecy and secrets in relation to ineffable truths. Basically, this line of research pursues the ways in which an individual claims to have a secret route to understanding ultimate reality. Our name for this dramatic dynamic is, variously, Platonism or "the occult." A number of articles, including "Benjamin's Magic," published in Telos (2001); "H.P. Blavatsky and the Magic of Esoteric Language," published in The Journal of Rhetoric and Religion (2002); "The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology," published in The Western Journal of Communication (2004); "An Occult Poetics, or, the Secret Rhetoric of Religion," published in Rhetorical Society Quarterly (2004); and "Prime Time Satanism: Rumor Panic and the Work of Iconic Topoi," published in Visual Communication (2004), concern my interest in the rhetorical work of ineffability and transcendence. My study in this area has culminated in a book-length "remix" of my dissertation, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century, which was published by the University of Alabama Press in the summer of 2005.

In addition to popular music and the occultic, a third exploratory beam that has appeared in my most recent scholarship is psychoanalysis. During my last year at the University of Minnesota, I was introduced to psychoanalysis while taking a course from Thomas Pepper on Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. This led me to the tortuous work of Jacques Lacan and his followers, particularly Bruce Fink and Slavoj Zizek. Gradually, it occurred to me that psychoanalysis provides very useful explanatory mechanisms in respect to ineffability ("the Real") and transcendence ("phantasy"). Unfortunately, among scholars in my field, very little work has been done from a psychoanalytic perspective; in fact, it took me over two years to get a psychoanalytic criticism in print after repeated rejections by peer reviewers in my field.

My interest in psychoanalysis has led me to pursue two, interrelated projects: first, there is the project of translation, or of explaining, in tiny steps, the relationship between psychoanalysis and rhetoric (not only to scholars in my field, but to myself). The groundwork for this discipline-specific project was laid in "Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and its Decline in US Rhetorical Studies," which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2003. What I wanted to do in this article is introduce the unfamiliar concept with something familiar. Basically, rhetorical scholars are well-versed in the faculty of imagination. What I try to do in this essay is leap-frog from the known "imagination" to the sociological and psychoanalytic concepts of the "imaginary." This essay was followed-up with "Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead," also published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2004). My strategy here was very similar, moving from a well-understood rhetorical concept of "fantasy" to the psychoanalytic concept of "phantasy" by way of the Imaginary. Other articles, such as "Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Subjectivication and the Unconscious," continue this project of translation. The second project that involves psychoanalysis is my current book in progress, "Haunting Voices: Speech and Transcendence in Postmodernity." This work focuses on the object of the disembodied voice in our daily life experiences.

In sum, then, I think my research to date pursues two, overlapping projects: (1) the investigation of psychoanalysis (generally, not simply Lacanian) in relation to persuasion; and (2) the analysis of theological forms in popular and unpopular culture (inclusive of music). Although the discipline remains largely resistant to psychoanalytic approaches, psychoanalysis remains a useful explanatory tool for me and I think I will stick with it for a number of years. I am also confident that I will continue to research and pursue the "popular" as an object of study. While my allegiance to psychoanalysis remains largely pragmatic, my commitment to understanding the rhetoric of the everyday, the practices and objects "of the people," is resolutely political.