He graduated with his B.A. from Brigham Young University and has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book manuscript focused on how authors and filmmakers represented a 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo. He was working on this project in Kyoto, Japan with a Fellowship from the Japan Foundation when the March 11th disaster struck. Though he was far from the destruction, representations of this more recent disaster in news and new media forms has provided fruitful opportunities for comparison.