It's time to introduce ourselves, so I'll start:

I'm now in my seventh year here at Purdue, and I have enjoyed every minute of my time here. Before 2000, I taught at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for eleven years. My "home" is probably Southern California, where I spent all my time in grad school at SDSU and USC. I've been reading and writing about Burke since I first read A Grammar of Motives in William Covino's "Modern Rhetorical Theory" class in February, 1984 (wow, now that dates me a little bit). I knew then, though, that something was going on with Burke that I needed to know more about, and so there you have it.

This semester, I'll be working on a few Burke-related projects: a conference proposal for RSA and then a paper for the big Burke conference next summer at Villanova. I'm working with Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber to get their new edited book done later this fall, Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke. That should be exciting. The project is nearly finished, so we'll have some sort of release party when the book is here.

Here's something about the "other" me (we are a parliament of voices, after all): I love astronomy and am looking forward to the day when I can build an observatory in my backyard and have a giant telescope. I made an observatory when I was 16, but it was a dud, so I have to try again sometime before too long. In the meantime, there's always "the rhetoric of astronomy."

Cheers,
Dave