My research lies at the intersection of media law, technology studies, historical understandings of emotion and/in communication, and conceptions of the public sphere. I teach in the areas of media history, free speech and media technologies, documentary, and cultural studies of journalism.
My first book, Murder, Media, and the Politics of Public Feeling ( Indiana University Press, 2011), analyzes the media coverage and cultural and political responses to the murders of James Byrd Jr., a black man dragged to death in Texas, and Matthew Shepard, a young gay man beaten to death in Wyoming. Using textual analysis of media and legal texts as well as interviews with activists and lawmakers, the book shows how emotional media discourse has material effects within institutional settings. The media-enabled emotional responses to these murders were thus not an example of the privatization of politics, but provided the grounds for the formation of activist publics and the passage of laws.
I am currently writing a second book, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and the First Amendment. The book analyzes how legal conceptions of speech within First Amendment law changed over the 20th century, from a strictly deliberative and linguistic definition to one that encompasses symbols, aesthetics, and emotion. I suggest that this history is as much about new media technologies and social scientific ideas about communication and rationality as it is about politics and legal theory. Research on the book has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.