I am Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where I have taught since 1978. Here I founded and directed the Writer's Workshop, a peer tutoring facility, and a writing-across-the-curriculum program. I have also directed the College Honors and English Honors programs, and have chaired the English Department. I teach first-year composition, rhetoric and public speaking, nineteenth-century American literature and women's literature.

I am the President of the Rhetoric Society of America until January 2006, when I will take the office of Immediate Past President. I chaired the 2004 biennial international conference of the Society. Forthcoming: my edited volume of the proceedings of that meeting, Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual, published by Lawrence Erlbaum. Please see www.rhetoricsociety.org for current information on the Society. 

Among my current research interests is the question of how the increasing diversification of academic discourses affects the teaching of writing to college students. A recent publication in this area is the collection ALT/DIS, co-edited with Helen Fox and Christopher Schroeder, and my essay in that volume. Also, I am interested in women’s rhetoric, particularly in nineteenth-century America. Some of my work in this area can be found in the selections by women included in the second edition (2001) of The Rhetorical Tradition, co-authored with Bruce Herzberg.A newer interest is Jewish rhetoric, e.g the Jewish-Christian disputation at Barcelona in 1262 and the civil rights rhetoric of Abraham Joshua Heschel.