About

Justin is a graduate of the interdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. His dissertation, I Am an Author: Performing Authorship in Literary Culture, analyzes authorship as a mediated identity performance in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework, combining authorship studies, performance studies, celebrity/persona studies, media and cultural studies, and sociological studies of art to uncover how writers create and disseminate their authorial identities across media channels. He is particularly interested in how the digital—more specifically social media—shapes and complicates our conceptions of identity performance, celebrity, authorship, art, and communication. Recently, he published an article in issue 7.1 of Authorship, and he has a forthcoming piece in issue 14.4 of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Justin’s article on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was published in issue 17.2 of The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture. He’s presented papers at national and regional conferences on authors’ fashions, twitter, and Kim Kardashian. At VCU, he taught World Literature, American Literature, Textual Analysis, and Reading Film, and before returning to school to complete his PhD studies, he taught composition and research, as well as information literacy, at Ferrum College and college composition at Virginia Western Community College and York Technical College.