About Chora Novum
Chora Novum Media is the home for my work as a writer, educator, and communications consultant. The name reflects two commitments: chora as a generative space where new meanings and possibilities can take shape, and novum as the belief that imagination, analysis, and collective effort can produce genuinely new ways of living and understanding the world.
Chora Novum is where analysis, narrative, and pedagogy meet—where I examine how systems operate, how stories circulate, and how people navigate conditions that are confusing, unequal, or actively hostile. It is also a space for asking what must change and for doing the imaginative and material work required to make those changes conceivable.
About Me
I’m Nate—a writer, researcher, and educator with a PhD in English. My work focuses on public health, LGBTQIA and transgender issues, climate crisis, and the shifting narratives, beliefs, and policies that shape contemporary political and popular understanding—with real consequences for how we research, learn, live, and communicate. I write from a materialist perspective and draw on rhetorical analysis, science communication, media studies, and theory to clarify how power operates and how misinformation takes hold.
My academic training and pedagogy focus on:
- Gender and social reproduction
- Transgender Studies and Marxist analysis
- Public health rhetoric and science communication
- Information literacy and critical inquiry
- Labor literature and organizing
- Disaster narratives, fictional and non-fictional
Over more than a decade of teaching writing and research at the university level, I worked with a wide range of students whose backgrounds, goals, and needs varied significantly. That work taught me two principles that guide everything I do:
- People can handle complexity when they are given the tools, context, and respect required to engage it.
- Learning is most meaningful when it speaks to the actual world people are trying to navigate.
Chora Novum Media continues that work in a public, accessible form.
How I Work with Language and Audience
My work shifts registers—professional, analytic, theoretical, or personal—depending on the audience and the task. The goal is always clarity: meeting readers where they are without condescension and giving them the conceptual tools they need to understand complex issues.
On Misinformation and Panic Cycles
Much of my work involves clarifying how misinformation spreads and how panic cycles function—who benefits from them, how they distort public understanding, and what tools people can use to resist that distortion.
Chora Novum Media’s Broader Purpose
Chora Novum Media exists to make complex information accessible, to offer tools for critical thinking and care, and to help people and institutions communicate more effectively in an increasingly volatile informational landscape. The goal is not neutrality—it is clarity, accuracy, and a commitment to human wellbeing.
Selected Publications
“The Future of Trans Politics” — Verso Blog (2021)
“Seizing the Means: Toward a Trans Epistemology” — In Transgender Marxism, Pluto Press (2021)
Gender Apocalypse: Social Reproductive Horror and Climate Grief — PhD Dissertation, SUNY Buffalo (2023)
Selected Presentations & Workshops
M&D Science Consulting and Communications. “Using Inclusive Language for Representing LGBTQ+ Individuals in Medical Research.” Guest discussant, webinar (Spring 2026).
“Research as Community.” Professional development workshop host (Buffalo, November 2024).
“Gender Apocalypse.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Modern Language Association (Boston, March 2024).
“Cultural Representations of Social Reproduction.” Panel co-chair, Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Modern Language Association (Boston, March 2024).