Talks
Why You Keep Rewatching the Same TV Show
Why do we return to the same television shows even when there is seemingly endless new entertainment available? This talk explores the appeal of familiarity, repetition, and the worlds we return to again and again.
This talk was presented at TEDxAUA in 2024. It received Editor's Choice and was subsequently featured on the main TED YouTube channel.
Conference Presentations
2024
The ‘Ordinary Magic’ of Resilience in Anglophone
Literatures: Past, Present, Futures
University of Stuttgart
“Colonized Resilience: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Problem
of Being Resilient.”
2023
16th Annual SAAS Conference
Granada, Spain
“Don’t Drink the Nostalgia: An Exploration of the Distrust
of Nostalgia in Black Mirror and Stranger Things.”
XV James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference:
Joys in Transition
“The Serialized Wake: Mass Production in the Language
of Joyce.”
2022
Time of Monsters Conference
Institute of Modern Languages, University of
Bielsko-Biała
“Natural Horror: Nature Itself as the True Monster in
Eco-Horror.”
Crossing Boundaries: Rethinking the Humanities
across Disciplines
Sofia University
“The Simulacrum Classroom: Composition Classes as a
Representation of Themselves.”
2020
16th Annual Applied Linguistics Research Lab
Conference (ALLAB)
“Phonological Features of Saudi Arabian Anthroponyms.”
2019
METU British International Conference
“A Foucauldian Analysis of Hegelian Dialectics in Defoe.”
Society for Values in Higher Education
Conference
“The Moral Ambiguity of Labor in First Year English
(FYE) Courses.”
Moral Machines: The Ethics and Politics of the
Digital World Symposium
“A Conversation Between Objects: The Ethical Underpinnings
of the IoT.”
2018
Literature at Sea Conference
“Claustrophobia on the Ocean: An Exploration of Hitchcock's
Lifeboat.”
Memory, Affects, and Emotions Conference
“Teaching Affect in a STEM Classroom.”
Polytechnic Summit
“Integration of Design Thinking, Innovation, and
Transdisciplinary Studies for Student Teams Competing in
the Solar Decathlon Latin America and Caribbean.”
Education, New Developments (END) Conference
“Transdisciplinary Writing: An Exercise in Explaining
Visual Design Programs.”
Education, New Developments (END) Conference
“Defining Transdisciplinarity.”
General Education Conference
“Team-Teaching in a Transdisciplinary Classroom.”
Cities, Embodiments, Technologies Conference
“Putting Technology Under Erasure: The (Im)possibility of
the 21st Century Flâneur.”
2017
Frontiers in Education Annual Conference
“Leading and Administering Transformative Change in
Education Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries.”
Frontiers in Education Annual Conference
“Fostering Metacognition Development in a STEM Context.”
2016
RMMLA Convention
“Teaching Literature in a Transdisciplinary Classroom:
Orwell and Beyond.”
AECT Summer Research Symposium
“Storytelling and the Transdisciplinary Classroom.”
Conference on College Composition and
Communication (CCCC)
“A Transdisciplinary Experiment in First-Year Composition.”
NeMLA Conference
“Why Talk About Toilets in a Transdisciplinary Classroom?”
2015
Sight Unseen Conference, Irish Association for
American Studies
“Not Privy to the Conversation: Harry Caul as a Peripheral
Character in Coppola’s Film.”
PCA/ACA Conference
“Converging Voices: Musical Leitmotifs in Shakespearean
Adaptations.”
Conference on College Composition and
Communication
“Listening for Laughter: Revealing the Humorous Subtext
of Composition.”
College English Association: Caribbean
Chapter
“Disability and Film: Disability Reflected within the Film
Medium Itself.”
Southwest Popular Culture / American Culture
Association Conference
“Kyu: A Semantic Analysis of Kin-Dza-Dza.”
New Voices Conference
“Freud, Superego, Python.”
2012–2011
Rhetoric Society of America Conference
“@$$hole: A Story of Internet ‘Being’ and Rebellion.”
Midwest Conference on Utopian Studies
“The Droogs Speak Doubleplusgood: A Historical Linguistic
Analysis of Nadsat and Newspeak.”
Purdue Linguistics Symposium
“Just Gimme Some Truth: An Addendum to the SMH and GTVH
Using Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.”
Purdue American Studies Symposium
“Silence in Frederick Wiseman’s Documentaries.”
CUNY Graduate Center Comparative Literature
Conference
“The Dedalus Complex: A Lacanian Analysis of James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
2010
Mardi Gras Conference at LSU
“Untitled: A Deconstructionist Analysis of Percy’s
Adaptations of Film in The Moviegoers.”
Midwest Popular Culture Association /
Midwest American Culture Association
“Two is Great, but Three's a Crowd: The Rhizomatic
Insanity of Tommy Wiseau's The Room.”