I went to college at the University of Michigan and got my PhD from UC Berkeley.  I then spent three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 2006 until joining Rutgers in 2013.  Between college and grad school, I worked in Chicago, designing and implementing programs for GED instruction in public housing and for ESL instruction in the Latino community.

My research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models.  I am especially interested in metaphor and other forms of figurative speech; in slurs and other forms of ‘loaded’ language; in cognitive perspectives and emotions; and in non-sentential representational systems such as maps and diagrams.