I grew up in a small town in southwest Michigan. I briefly left the Midwest to attend Vassar College, where I graduated with a B.A. in English, philosophy, and queer studies. At Vassar, I participated in student journalism, working my way from copy staffer to Managing Editor at The Miscellany News, a fully student-run newspaper of record. There, I learned the value of investigation, sharpened my editorial skills, ran an advice column, and spent countless hours wrestling with a wheezing computer to make Adobe InDesign behave itself. A portfolio of my editorial writing from the Misc won the 2020 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Regional Editorial Writing Award. During undergrad, a generous grant from We Need Diverse Books allowed me to work as an editorial intern at Candlewick Press, a noted publisher of children's literature. There, I sifted through manucripts, learned how to write jacket copy, and even had the opportunity to fact-check a non-fiction volume. My senior project in English—"Forget Hell: Explorers Discover Heck," a novella about career failures and moving back to one's hometown after coming out as transgender—won the Anne M. Imbrie Prize for Fiction Writing. Throughout my undergraduate experience, my pre-existing love of knitting and all things textile became a defining part of my identity. I can still be found knitting while engaged in seminars, sitting on a park bench, or watching Pride and Prejudice (1995) for the umpteenth time.
Though I will always have a deep and abiding love for narrative writing (and especially how we teach kids to love reading it), my real drive comes from attempting to make sense of the world and its problems. So, after graduating with general and departmental honors from Vassar, I returned to the Midwest to pursue my PhD at Purdue's Department of Philosophy. Here, I have found a community of engaged scholars working on an exceptionally broad array of issues, such that my formal attempts to determine what is going on on the internet make me only slightly idiosyncratic. My time as a journalist, my experiences as a disabled academic, and reflections on growing up in an out-of-the-way place while the social internet became ubiquitous all shape my perspective and research interests. The mentorship and support I have received at Purdue have allowed me to craft a robust approach to answering the questions I find most compelling, and I look forward to continuing this work.