About Franny:
I am a graduate student pursuing my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech.
I received a B.A. in Social Relations (2006) and an M.A. in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing (2010) from Michigan State University.
I am also proud to be an alumna of the AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer program, where I served at the Allen Neighborhood Center in Lansing, Michigan for two years.
I am primarily interested in visual rhetoric and the rhetorical study of comics. My work asks the question: what are comics for? In order to theorize this, I use an arts-based methodology, as well as historiography, cultural rhetorical analysis, and remix. In other words, I make comics in order to better understand how they work and what they can do. I enjoy the challenge of navigating the space between the typical genres of humanities scholarship and those of the underground comics scene.
Aside from comics, I am also interested in the relationship between composing in human languages and computer languages, disability studies, the canon of memory, and decolonial histories of rhetoric and writing.