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 and a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario in 2011.

I am currently a Leecturer in the Faculty of Media and Information Studies at The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. I have presented at conferences in North America, Europe, and Australia, including SIGGRAPH, the annual conference for the Society for Animation Studies, and the Annual Conference of the German Communication Association (DGPuK).

Research Interests
Currently, my research interests lie in the areas of digital media and culture, user-generated media, and participatory journalism, counter-public spheres, and inter-media agenda setting. I am also interested in visual culture, media aesthetics, media convergence and remediation, and mediatization.

My doctoral dissertation, Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and Digital Media: Mass Media’s Challenge to the Democratization of Media Production, investigated 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 undertook case studies of animation and reality media in an attempt to understand the role immediacy plays in television's adaptation of new media aesthetics and problematize the assumed "independent" nature of online media production.

In the future I hope to expand this research by exploring user-generated media and public service broadcasting in Europe, as well as the role of user-generated media and in social movements.