Research

My scholarship is situated at the intersection of literacy studies, composition/rhetoric, and applied linguistics, where it informs critical approaches to language diversity in writing and writing education. I engage with fields and subfields such as second language writing, community literacy studies, and transnational literacy. My research develops theories about how writing practices move across linguistic and geographic boundaries, using qualitative methods to shift understandings of writing away from multilingual writers’ failings and toward their existing and future literate expertise.

My first monograph, Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), describes the everyday literacy lives of multilingual migrants and the ways their savvy writing practices are recognized or ignored as they move around the world. My second co-written book, Transfer: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research and Pedagogy (Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, July 2023), shows how writers transfer their writing-related knowledge among contexts or languages more generally. My current book interrogates the question the previous two have left me with: how literate movement—multilingualism, migration, transfer—creates a distinct kind of awareness in writers. I offered one response to this question in my article “Multilingual Writing as Rhetorical Attunement” (College English, 2014), arguing that many multilingual writers are especially “tuned” to difference by virtue of writing among languages in their everyday lives. My in-progress second monograph, Literate Mending: Writing Relations in Multilingual Families, offers empirical grounding for that theory by examining multilingual heritage in immigrant families.

Books

Edited Special Issues

Articles, Essays, and Book Chapters

Reviews