I am a rhetorical historian who studies how non-expert groups respond to and circumvent medical controversy and dissensus. In particular, I am interested in the vernacular, ad hoc embodied practices that emerge in response to large-scale public health crises. My current project is a rhetorical history of the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, with special attention paid to how sexually active gay men developed safer sex strategies before the isolation of HIV as AIDS causal agent in 1984. Informing this work is an interest in bodily rhetorics, sexuality, and spatial rhetorics. Increasingly, my thinking concerns everyday manifestations immunological thinking, in particular how popular conceptions of the immune system influence and steer interpersonal interactions.