John Moist is from Altoona, Pennsylvania and graduated a Mercy Presidential Scholar with Honors from Mount Aloysius College with a degree in English. He has worked at The University of Maine at Presque Isle, on radio, and on the stage. He was a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Baylor, taught in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, and was an Editorial Intern for Rhetoric and Public Affairs. His research and writing at Illinois focuses on commercialism, rhetoric, and economics. He enjoys film, gadgets, carbonation, audio, and playing Destiny.

My research focuses on rhetoric and economics. In particular, I've written about how citizens negotiate values of work, productivity, and labor in digital spaces. I've also focused on the emergence of the internet as a space for entrepreneurship, the development of digital work culture, and the economics of advanced computing/automated labor. Broadly, I consider questions of rhetoric, class, and economics through the lens of communication.