Schuler Benson joins the UWP in Fall 2024 as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. His first-year writing courses position passion and enthusiasm as core motivators in academic pursuits, encouraging students to view their interests and experiences as expertise they can draw on in order to introduce their own pet projects into unexpected academic conversations. Schuler’s scholarly interests in rhetorical theory, sound studies, and embodiment currently overlap with his personal interests in music and culture. He is curious about how audiences define and assign meaning in composition, as well as how they invent, perceive, and participate in the relationship between meaning and accessibility, specifically as this relationship occurs across the extreme music spectrum. His most recent recording collaboration released its debut album in April 2024, blending niche punk, metal, and electronic subgenres with body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB)-generated samples. His current collaboration focuses on depictions of eating disorders and related drug use, testing the pop contagion of ‘90’s industrial rock/metal against the emotional and sociocultural capacities of modern grindcore and harsh noise. He earned his Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric at the University of South Carolina in 2022. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, dog, and four (!) cats.