Jeff Nagel is a doctoral candidate in Penn State’s Department of Communication Arts and Sciences where he studies the intersection of absence, queerness, memory, and social movements. His dissertation, entitled “Queering Absence: The Rhetoric of the Homophile Movement,” examines key moments in American homophile activism (a direct precursor to the modern gay rights movement) and connects archival recovery with queer rhetorical theory. These moments reveal a complex relationship between queerness and absence, and the underappreciated debt modern queer organizing has to these earlier efforts. His work appears several journals including Rhetoric Society Quarterly, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and Women’s Studies in Communication.