I am currently a Media Studies PhD Candidate and part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Information Studies at The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

Academic History
I earned my B.A. in Telecommunications (with a Psychology minor) from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 2000. After working as a web and multimedia developer for a few years, I returned to school, earning my M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from Indiana University (Indianapolis) in 2005.

I began my PhD studies at UWO in the fall of 2005, and plan to complete my dissertation, currently entitled Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and New Media: Challenging the Independence of the User/Producer during the 2009-2010 school year. During my PhD studies, I have presented at conferences in North America, Europe, and Australia, including SIGGRAPH, the annual conference for the Society for Animation Studies, and the 54th Annual Conference of the German Communication Association (DGPuK).

Research Interests
Currently, my research interests lie in the areas of visual culture, media convergence and remediation, and television and new media aesthetics. Specifically, I am interested in television's appropriation of the aesthetics of user-produced content distributed on the Internet, and the social, cultural, and political reasons for, and implications of, this appropriation. I have undertaken case studies of animation, as well as reality media, in an attempt to understand the role immediacy plays in television's adaptation of new media aesthetics. In the process, I hope to problematize the assumed "independent" nature of online media production.