She received her Ph.D. in speech communication from Penn State University in 2002. Her research emphasizes the intersection of rhetorical scholarship, feminist studies, and media criticism, and is particularly concerned with how the media functions politically, socially, historically, and economically. Her scholarship has appeared in the Western Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, the Anthology Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era and the forthcoming collection The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary.