He received his Ph.D. in Communication Studies and earned a certificate in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to Iowa, he was a Teaching Fellow at Quest University Canada in British Columbia. His research focuses on practices of public culture. His current research examines the role of rhetoric in U.S. public and political culture and addresses the ethical and political demands that citizens face when communicating deliberatively in public. He is particularly interested in the effects of apparent artificialness in democratic speech and the precarity of sincerity as an ethical baseline for communication.