Mapping My Next Chapter: From Research to Communications

For years, my work has centered on how people move through space—how they make meaning as they travel, cross cultural borders, and find their place in the world. In my research, this meant tracing literary figures across maps and centuries to understand how stories create belonging when geography itself feels unstable. 

What I didn’t expect was that this fascination with movement and orientation would eventually guide my own path away from academia and toward a new professional landscape: corporate communications.

At first glance, the shift from American literary studies to organizational storytelling might seem like a leap. But to me, it feels like a continuation. Communication, after all, is its own geography. We shape this geography in a myriad of ways using rhetoric. Our speech patterns, word choices, and sentence structure are the building blocks that add up to the dynamic and exciting world in which we live.

 Communication how people navigate complexity (and difficulty) together—how organizations locate their purpose, how teams stay connected across distance, and how individuals find their place within a larger narrative.

From Research to Corporate Communications, or Message Strategy

During my PhD, I learned to manage long-term projects with multiple stakeholders, synthesize massive amounts of information, and communicate across audiences with very different needs.

When you really know your audience and your material, clarity becomes the main goal. 

The further I got into my research the more I found myself returning to the basics of clear, effective communication. Every chapter, conference presentation, and article forced me to translate complex ideas into stories people could follow.

That process—turning analysis into action—is exactly what drives corporate communication.

The Thread That Connects It All

If there’s a theme running through both worlds, it’s this: stories move people. They help us understand not only what we do, but why it matters. As I've shifted my attention from research to corporate communications, I am astounded by how many threads unite these two fields.

In academia, using stories to move people meant revealing how literature mapped understandings of place in a constantly-shifting cultural landscape. In corporate settings, it means helping organizations articulate meaning in moments of uncertainty. Either way, communication becomes a kind of way-finding. 

Clear communication is the lighthouse helping people locate themselves within larger systems and shared goals.

What Comes Next

As I move into this next chapter, I’m building a portfolio that bridges the two worlds: research distilled into strategy, complex ideas translated into clarity. My goal is to help organizations communicate with purpose and to tell stories that orient, connect, and inspire.

Because whether you’re studying novels or leading teams, the challenge is the same: how do we find our way together?